Today we started bright and early at 8 am as we boarded the bus to Limassol. We had a meeting with pharmaceutical company Medochemie. They are a manufacturing and distribution company for various narcotics, injections, and aerosols. Their goal is to produce quality products at a low cost to their customers. It was interesting to learn about their quality assurance check marks and supply chain system for their various products. I learned that in order to be in this business you need a lot of forward thinking and be able to judge the market in coming years. They do a lot of their planning years ahead of execution and have to plan the lifeline of products before they even reach the manufacturing stage. I was always curious about how the drugs we take are mass produced and so it was cool to see inside their warehouse and learn about the way they make all the products in batches to be tested and quality controlled. I was curious about how they chose the locations for their warehouses and factories. I learned that people choose to base their headquarters in Cyprus because of the taxes. In addition, Medochemie chose Vietnam because of the low cost but high quality and the Netherlands to have their foot into the European monopoly.

After that visit, we headed to the university campus where we had lunch and waited for a visit from Wargaming. Before this class, I had never heard of the games that Wargaming was producing but I was still excited to hear from them because I have always been interested in game design. It was cool to hear about their different offices and how having the headquarters in Cyprus put them in the middle of all their other offices. I was also intrigued to hear about their different marketing strategies and how they approached customer bases differently based on the region. When Slava started talking about how an idea became a product it brought me back to a class I took this semester, The Art of Making. It was all about human centered design and our professor introduced a new concept to us, pretotyping, a low-cost and low-effort test of product that gives the user a general idea of what the product is. This is essentially what Wargaming did to test out video game ideas before they are created to see if players would like the game. I also thought the question he posed at the end was very interesting because of this idea of toxic positivity. It got me to thinking that people nowadays are so afraid of failure and being mean to others that so many things get passed the initial stages because people say it is a good idea, but in the end its not useful to them. So that initial honesty and brutality from people is what is needed because it is okay to fail as long as you can get back up after.