Portfolio Creativity Blog Post 3

This week, I did a creative exercise found in the book:

"CAFFEINE FOR THE CREATIVE MIND" by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield.

The exercise can be found on page 103.

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Instructions: Replace the Receptionist

Excuse me, your 3:00 is here.

47 floors of office workers, hundreds and hundreds of people. You enter the building and you're immediately greeted by the liaison between you down here and them up there... The receptionist.

The receptionist's job is to communicate to someone up there that you down here require their attention. The usual choice of communication is the telephone or intercom.

Today, you're in charge of coming up with a better system to let them up there know you're down here.

Either by writing out the idea or sketching it on paper, develop a better solution to alert someone within the company that they have a visitor or that that there is some attention needed at the front desk.

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My idea is to design a self-service kiosk to be placed in the front of an office building. The kiosk includes a touchscreen where visitors can enter three pieces of information:

• Company
• Floor #
• Name

Once the information is input, the recipient receives a notification on the intercom and can choose to allow the visitor to proceed or not by sending a notification to security, posted just beyond the kiosk.

This problem-solving exercise is designed to get you the brainstorm ideas that work as well or better than a receptionist in a professional environment.

Receptionists manage flow, answer questions, and provide direction, but a kiosk can handle many of those functions if designed correctly.

This kiosk, or multiple kiosks at the ground floor lobby could reduce the need for receptionists on every floor.

I learned that it is not always about inventing something brand new, sometimes creativity means thinking about what already exists and repurposing it to increase efficiency.