WBI at Bricks Cascade 2025: Piece on Earth

Last month, the Women⁺s Brick Initiative (WBI) team attended Bricks Cascade a LEGO convention in Portland, Oregon (USA), one of several Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL) Networking Events that happen annually around the world. According to the statistics provided at the Closing Ceremony, 607 AFOLs attended, displaying 1,608 My Own Creations (MOCs), which drew a crowd of 7,895 exhibition attendees.

For the second time ever, WBI chose to award a trophy for a MOC, titled “Your Story Matters.” This trophy award was first presented at the inaugural Bricks Slopes in Denver back in April. Several contributors from the WBI formed a panel to choose a MOC built with the intent to foster connections through storytelling, advocating for change, or promoting healing. The MOC chosen by the WBI panel for this trophy award was created by Laura Parisi and her son, AJ Parisi-Peters, titled “Historic Warming Hut at Mount Hood Ski Bowl.” This MOC had a historical sheet posted, describing the build and why it was important to both of them.

Meanwhile, WBI also hosted a workshop on the Friday of the convention (16 May), where 51 attendees participated in several activities.

The first activity gave participants an opportunity to share their thoughts on belonging and inclusivity within the LEGO hobby. A series of images with captions were displayed, ranging from LEGO memes to article excerpts to diversity-themed research data. The images presented controversial topics and invited participants to share their thoughts. Each participant was given dot stickers to place somewhere on an 11″x17″ paper beneath the image, with the paper’s horizontal direction expressing feeling of inclusivity (left side of the paper representing extremely inclusive) and the vertical direction expressing the strength of that feeling (top of the page representing a very strong feeling). The activity was intriguing, because many topics showed strong thought uniformity within the group present, resulting in many dot stickers clustered together. But some topics weren’t nearly so unanimous in perception, with dots spread more evenly across the page.

The second activity involved building a sig-fig out of provided minidoll and minifigure parts which participants were told to use to identify themselves. However, the parts selection was intentionally limited. Participants were only given minidoll and minifigure hair pieces which are typically associated with women of color while the provided torsos all had some yellow to represent exposed skin. No legs were provided, as many participants struggled to find an appropriate mix of hair, head, and torso in general, and adding extra legs and lower body options would have further complicated the activity. After several minutes of choosing sig-fig parts, the discussion then moved to asking participants about their sig-fig building experience. Some mentioned the hair pieces were all ethnically-coded, while others mentioned the skin color options. Some were excited by the fun new pieces while others commented on a lack of gray hair. The lack of yellow heads and no lighter skin tones was definitely noticed by the participants.

The workshop concluded with a free-build session where participants each began to build from a polybag, and then switched creations with other participants to get an experience of interacting with someone else’s creativity.

The main purpose of this workshop, and others like it hosted at the Skaerbaek Fan Weekend annually in Billund, Denmark, is to note the lack of representation for minority populations throughout the LEGO community. An attendee highlighted how challenging it is to find appropriately colored hands, because even when ethnically diverse minifigures are represented, they are too often wearing gloves, so there’s a lack of corresponding hands matching the skin tone of minifigure faces. Activities such as this help participants who may not be aware of the limited availability of minifigure pieces for people of color to realize the discrepancies with representation. For more information from the WBI on this and other topics, check out these research blog articles on WBI’s website.

LEGO conventions such as Bricks Cascade often have an internal awards ceremony which recognizes LEGO creators in specific themes. The 21 themes for Bricks Cascade include: Architecture, Art, Battle, Bionicle, Castle / Pirates, Classic, Cosplay, Jurassic World, Mecha, Microscale, Mixed, Photography, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Pop Culture, Post-Apocalyptic, Space, Star Wars, Steampunk, Technic, and Trains (Town and Country). These awards are decided on by theme coordinators during the convention and usually each theme presents three to six trophies within their theme. One of the things WBI members tracked during Bricks Cascade was the dispersion rate between male-presenting and non-male-presenting award recipients. As these male-presenting and non-male-presenting statistics are done via hand-written notes during the ceremony, it’s possible some gender identities are incorrect, and this is an acknowledged data point. Taken at face-value, with an apologetic note of potential gender error, 62 male-presenting and 18 non-male-presenting individuals won trophy awards presented through the theme coordinators at Bricks Cascade.

Many themes didn’t appear to award any trophies to women (such as Architecture, Battle, Bionicle, Castle / Pirates, Mecha, Post-Apocalyptic, Star Wars, and Steampunk) and the highest concentration of women who received trophies occurred in Art and Photography. While the conclusion can be made that non-male presenting creators are disproportionately awarded trophies in some categories and overlooked in others, there is definitely missing data in order to form potential correlations, or to be able to build appropriate pattern modeling. The missing data includes items such as the overall gender-ratio of registered AFOLs, the gender-ratio of submissions within each theme, how many MOCs each creator displayed, and the categories they selected for their creations.

Even though the potential exists for the LEGO hobby to still be perceived as male-dominated, things really have changed in even just the last several years. There’s always room for improvement with representation, but more and more women, non-binary, genderfluid, and other minority populations continue to show up in greater numbers to each convention, with many submitting their own art within the LEGO hobby for public display at these conventions. Some women had been attending LEGO fan conventions for years or even more than a decade; some only recently started in the hobby and displayed for the very first time at Bricks Cascade; and some younger builders were displaying for the first time after attending Bricks Cascade for their entire young life. The overall convention atmosphere was one of inclusion, respect, excitement, and the desire to continue making the LEGO hobby representative of everyone who enjoys playing well.