In early 2022, my company, Clarify Health, commissioned me to design an interactive LEGO installation to draw healthcare conference attendees to our booth. After a brief brainstorm, we landed on the idea of a “healthcare maze” as a metaphor for how difficult it is for patients to navigate their healthcare journeys. The idea was for participants to guide a LEGO minifigure through the maze to reach the center, and then they could keep the minifigure. We lit the path to the center with LED lights because our motto is “Light the path to better healthcare outcomes.”
I decided to base the maze design on the Overlook Maze from the 1980 Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining. This hedge maze features a single entrance with a garden at the center. I discovered detailed plans of the maze thanks to Adam Savage, who built a scale model in 2015 and posted all his research online.
I modeled the maze in Stud.io, LEGO CAD software. I chose dark azure for the walls because it resembles Clarify’s brand blue. The base consists of twelve 48 x 48 stud baseplates that can be disassembled for transport.
Total dimensions are 144 x 192 LEGO studs, about 3.75 x 5 feet. That’s 165 x 219 feet at minifig scale! The wall height is eight bricks tall, well above the height of a minifigure.
Next, I placed about 75 orders to different shops on Bricklink.com for roughly 12,000 LEGO elements and 500 minifigures to populate the maze. My three gray cats carefully inspected each phase of the building process, which lasted about two months.
I strung LED lights like breadcrumbs along the two paths to the maze’s center. I placed red lights and LEGO monsters at the eight dead ends. A compact battery powered the lights, hidden in a secret compartment near the front of the maze.
The final stages of the build involved creating detailed instructions for setting up and tearing down the maze, designing custom stickers with Clarify branding to match our booth, and building the LEGO “wands” that participants use to guide minifigures through the maze. It was also an excellent time to plant some easter eggs in the maze, like this custom Jack Nicholson minifigure.
I designed several fun accessories for the minifigures for maze winners to take home. Each person who “solved” the healthcare maze would get a Clarify-branded minifigure stand, a COVID vaccine syringe, and a laptop with our healthcare analytics software running on it. We also gave away custom shields at a Blue Cross Blue Shield conference.
I packed the maze in two large rolling bins, which was an amateur move. When I retrieved the bins at baggage claim in Miami, the lids were popping open, and pieces rattled around loose inside. I spent the night before the conference repairing the badly damaged maze walls, and to my surprise and relief, no LEGO pieces were lost in transit.
Finally, it was time to play! We set up over 100 minifigures in “precision cohorts” around the maze. Sure enough, it attracted a ton of attention. When people walked up, we invited them to pick out a minifigure to take home but then told them they’d have to get their minifigure through the maze first!
It was more challenging than I thought, but most people solved it in a few minutes. Since there were two possible ways of solving it, two people could start simultaneously and go down different paths to see who could solve it first.
The Maze debuted at the ViVE conference in Miami and went on to the HLTH conference in Orlando and several other US conferences. In total, we gave away more than 1,500 minifigures to happy maze-solvers.
After the conference season, the maze came to rest in our headquarters in San Francisco. It arrived in cardboard boxes and bubble wrap and was severely damaged. After some major TLC, I pieced it back together, and now it’s fully operational for guests and customers to play with when they visit.
