What is it? Who does it help? Who will I share my idea with?
The COVID-19 crisis element I will be responding to is the need for limited physical contact and social distancing. My solution for this is to design a contactless cafe, where the ordering and payment as well as serving of food is done through payment kiosks, serving windows and an app for ordering food.
The main group that will be helped with the contactless cafe are those who are vulnerable to disease (people with weakened immune systems and elders) as it will hopefully limit the spread of not only COVID-19 but other infectious diseases that can be spread through human contact. In the future it may also help people outside of this group in other ways, such as hearing-impaired people that can easily use the app/kiosks rather than trying to communicate with the server, people with severe cases of social anxiety who find it difficult to order food as well as people who English is their second language could use the app in their 1st language for easier communication
The contactless cafe is needed as it allows people to continue with a part of their everyday life like getting a coffee in the morning or grabbing lunch when out, but in a way that helps to limit the spread of diseases like COVID-19. Also, being mostly automated means that it will help further us technologically and integrate more helpful and intelligent technology into everyday life.
I would like to share my idea with other people who would be interested in larger scale solutions to the problems at hand. I would like to discuss with others who would like to design something such as a building or business to respond to the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to singular products or apps. This is because I believe their feedback would be more accurate and specific to what I'm doing. I will likely do this by talking to the people in my course through forums to find people with
Why is it important? Why is it unique?
I believe this idea is important in two major ways. The first being that, by eliminating as much human physical contact as possible, it will greatly reduce the spread of diseases including COVID-19, but allows people to continue on in their everyday life and give people jobs during the pandemic, providing psychological and moral as well as economic benefits. The second reason the idea is important is because it has benefits outside of the current crisis, such as helping to further integrate future technology into people's lives and make more everyday tasks like going to a cafe, more automated and convenient. Also like I mentioned earlier, incorporating the use of apps into ordering and serving goods allows people who otherwise would have difficulty with face to face interactions, including the hearing impaired, non-English speakers, those who suffer with social anxiety etc. This idea would not only help relieve problems caused by the COVID-19 crisis but it would continue to benefit many groups of society whose needs are often ignored.
I believe my idea is unique because of the pure scale, I want to create a whole new business and in theory I would like to create a widespread uptake in incorporating technology to increase efficiency in as many places as possible. I'm trying to look for a solution not only for the problems caused by COVID-19 but for life beyond it, and not just to solve a problem but to just make the way we do things a bit better.
What are some limitations?
When it comes to limitations, considering the physical size of my project there is the major limitation that I cannot actually build and then run the business of the cafe. But besides this I can focus on smaller more theoretical problems and limitations that I would need to think of solutions for. Firstly I would need to find a way to make the kiosks more hygienic when it comes to using them. Obviously taking out the human interaction will lower the risk of passing something too and from the cashier, there is still risk when it comes to touching the screen to order from as many people will be using it and could pass something onto the surface of the screen. Another problem I would like to find a solution too would be that the job positions would be decreased as neither waitresses nor cashiers would be needed anymore, It's incredibly important to keep jobs available and I would need to consider how to do this.