PARTISANS’ Jenga-inspired lamp wins a 2026 European design award

By Elena Vasquez

Jenga Light won the Home Lighting: Lamps and Luminaires category at the 2026 European Product Design Award, according to Yanko Design. Toronto studio PARTISANS created the lamp with translucent blocks that retain Jenga’s rectangular proportions and glow from within.

Yanko Design explains the mechanism: “The path the weight takes is the same path the power takes.” Electricity rises from a powered base through each point where one block rests on another.

How does stacking create light?

Every electrical connection has positive and negative sides. Each block hides a bridge rectifier, a four-diode circuit that sends current out the same way regardless of direction. Its LEDs therefore receive the correct polarity whichever way the block faces.

The inexpensive component removes the placement rules imposed by many stacking lights. Users can set a brick flat, flip it, rotate it or extend it into a cantilever, and the circuit still closes.

Lead designer Alex Josephson and teammate Teddy Shropshire developed the system. According to Yanko Design, “upside down” stops describing an electrical fault because the component handles orientation while gravity handles the rest.

Yanko Design compares the effect to a USB-C plug, which no longer cares which way you hold it. The circuit therefore asks only for a steady hand, not a learned sequence.

How does it differ from earlier modular lights?

Yanko Design places Jenga Light alongside several earlier systems:

• ThinkGeek’s Tetris lamp, sold around 2012, sent light from a powered bottom piece while interlocking tetrominoes steered the connections.
• Later modular light-kit patents used magnets and shaped contacts to prevent short circuits when blocks met at odd angles.
• LumiBlocks combined magnetic snap-together blocks with app control and RGBCW LEDs.

PARTISANS uses neither interlocking geometry nor magnets. Bridge rectifiers resolve electrical orientation, leaving the stacking action to determine which blocks stay connected. The result asks only for a steady hand, as Jenga itself does.

What makes the blocks glow?

Product photographs suggest the blocks are 3D-printed in translucent plastic, with visible layer lines and a wavy internal infill. Rather than conceal that texture, PARTISANS uses it as a lampshade: light passing through the infill paints a woven, scaly pattern across each face.

Most photographs show warm white light, while one hero image runs cooler. PARTISANS has not published brightness or color-temperature figures.

Why can’t the lamp survive a full game of Jenga?

Small metal contacts dot the top of every block, with three in a row on long pieces. According to Yanko Design, the powered base carries more contacts, a power cord and a small port on one side.

Those dots likely form a grid that governs how far one block can overhang the next and remain lit. Pulling a brick from the middle would disconnect the entire upper half, so the lamp cannot survive an actual round of Jenga.

The design keeps the game’s building half and retires its pulling half. A bumped table can still flatten a ten-minute spiral, preserving the most Jenga-like part of the object.

How did a Toronto game become a lighting concept?

Yanko Design traces the lineage through Jenga’s own history. Leslie Scott began the game as a family pastime with wooden blocks while growing up in Ghana, and it launched at the London Toy Fair in 1983.

Its major break came at the Toronto Toy Fair in 1986. Hasbro’s chairman reportedly decided he had to have the game. Four decades later, Toronto-based PARTISANS converted the same stack into a table lamp.

PARTISANS is mostly an architecture practice, best known for the cedar-lined Grotto Sauna on Georgian Bay. Josephson has also moved into lighting: his Gweilo lamps, made from hand-molded acrylic sheets, won the 2016 AZ Award for Best Lighting Installation.

Where does Jenga Light fit in playful lighting?

Other playful lighting examples include Analog lamps, which grew out of LEGO play and now sell at MoMA. App-controlled magnetic blocks also serve desk setups, and Jenga Light takes a different route.

Jenga Light has no app, color modes or magnets. Its central interaction is the physical assembly of the glowing tower, and its electrical system leaves orientation to the circuit.

Is Jenga Light ready to buy?

The European Product Design Award is an international competition that accepts prototypes as well as finished designs. It judges entries anonymously, allowing the win to recognize PARTISANS’s idea and engineering before any retail launch.

PARTISANS has not announced pricing, availability, a release date or the number of blocks in a full-height tower. Until those answers arrive, the pre-launch concept’s practical scale remains open: every added block must stay both stable and electrically connected.