Interviewing Niels Mølgård Frederiksen, LEGO Designer
When LEGO creates culturally appropriate LEGO sets for the mass market, I’ve always been curious to know what work goes into making those sets happen. Unlike sets based on LEGO City, or even LEGO Star Wars, sets that are based on specific cultures require just a bit more work, including lots of research to make sure the representation is appropriate. The LEGO Group gave GamesReviews the opportunity to interview Niels Mølgård Frederiksen, the designer behind the LEGO® Spring Festival Trotting Lantern set. We asked him about the process for this set specifically, but also a few other questions as well! Without further ado, here is our conversation with Niels!
Can you tell us your title, and briefly what you do at the LEGO Group?
Niels Mølgård Frederiksen, Associate Creative Lead for LEGO Star Wars™
What got you into designing LEGO sets? What is your history with the product?
Being a Danish-born kid in the 1980s meant that playing with LEGO bricks was practically embedded into my DNA. But my journey to becoming a LEGO designer is a tale of almost 15 years of trials, challenges, and taking various routes before finally landing the job in November 2013. My entire life, I’ve been building plastic model kits of cars, various planes, but mostly Sci-Fi related models such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and of course, Star Wars. I was part of a model building club in my hometown, and when one of my fellow modelers, Henrik, landed a position as a LEGO Designer in 1998, I started dreaming of becoming one as well.
A funny side story to that is when Henrik got the job, I told him that if I ever became a LEGO Designer, I would pitch LEGO Star Wars. On Henrik’s very first working day, he was tasked with working on LEGO Star Wars™ models, and he ended up designing the first Ultimate Collector Series (UCS) models—but he couldn’t tell me!
After high school, I studied Digital Design and Communication and worked in various companies as a web developer. I then switched to
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