Madeleine Carlsson

This week, we introduce Madeleine Carlsson. Madeleine is a relatively new adult fan of LEGO, only starting to emerge from her dark ages after 50.

Madeleine recalls her family owning very little LEGO; however, that didn’t stop her from playing with her friend’s LEGO. One week she would visit and build their sets, the next she would break them down and build her own designs.

Fast forward many years, Madeleine one day walked past a LEGO shop, curious to know if the toy is still as amazing as it used to be. She quickly found herself emerged in a world of her own creations, buying sets to build them once, and then breaking them apart for the pieces. By doing this, she learnt many techniques that could be applied to her own design.

Madeleine shares three amazing builds with us, one build she found online of a picture drawing machine, and two of her own creations.  She is always fascinated by movement and how to bring it into her models. To her, these moving models form the basis to STEM training, although she’s a firm believer that arts should also be part of the picture (STEAM). She explores these ideas through LEGO Boost, and  LEGO Powered Up. Then there’s the coding aspect, using Scratch, an easy to learn block-based programming language. Her dream is to one day educate children how to get into robotics.

A central theme around Madeleine’s MOCs is the idea of taking over the world. So, naturally, both the two designs she shares with us, has this theme at the centre. In the first MOC, she created a scene around one of her favourite opera arias, The Queen of the Night, except, in this version, a secondary story emerges where the queen is slightly evil and is systematically killing her family and everyone in her way to gain power. As Madeleine has a background in model-building from her days working in broadcast, she also enjoys showing off design and architecture in her creations.

The second MOC tells an even darker story of the future of humanity, where machines have started taking over the world, turning humans into cyborgs. With many failed experiments and iterations, they still have not mastered the ability to keep these creations alive. It’s a play on the idea that we as humans, need machines to do our work, and perhaps, in a distant future, machines will be adapting humans in such a way to do their job.

We had a fantastic time talking to Madeleine and hearing her fascinating take on MOC builds as well as how vital LEGO is in the education space. 

Links

Opera

JK Brickwork

LEGO Boost / Powered Up

Recognised LEGO® User Groups (South Africa)