Hey y’all! Day two commenced with a lovely, long, traffic-filled bus ride. Sarcasm aside, it was great to look out the window at the landscape during the ride. I still am so shocked that Cyprus is so dry and deserty. When we were arriving in Limassol, it was cool to see all the architecture. There were some really interesting, modern office buildings juxtaposed with more traditional housing. Also, I was shocked at how big Limassol was. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it seemed to cover much more area than I thought.
Our first adventure was at Medochemie. The office space was really cool; they had lots of art in intricate frames on the walls and lanterns hanging from the ceiling. At Medochemie, I learned a lot about pharmaceuticals. They introduced us to the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) which is like the FDA. With the GMP, they talked about quality assurance and the numerous measures needed to ensure consistent quality. I didn’t realize all of the different aspects and parts of the supply chain that need to be quality controlled like temperature, humidity, and even machinery.
We then had a nice lunch at the University of Nicosia. The Perch has literally nothing on that food. We got to just sit and relax in the shade and nice weather which was great.
Next was the meeting with Wargaming which was very intriguing. Slava seemed very knowledgeable in his field and brought so many insights. I loved his comments about all of the dating apps being monopolized. I thought it was interesting that their strategy involved competition between the different platforms/apps in the one company, but it makes sense that that strategy would yield good results. Later in the presentation, Slava mentioned how his solution to toxic positivity would involve a sort of competition strategy. I didn’t realize how valuable competition was in design and business; it’s not always a conflict starter.
What really connected with me in the Wargaming presentation was the process from idea to product. Last semester I took the Art of Making which taught us all about the human-centered design process. It was really cool to see the parallels between what we learned in class and reality. For example, when Slava was talking about how before coding the game they would make a board game out of paper to test if the game is even fun it sounded exactly like the pretotyping stage of design where you fake the functionality of the product to determine if you should continue with it before investing.
Overall, today was less of a cultural immersion and more about learning about supply chains and design. It was still valuable all the same but I’m very excited for the dinner ahead of me and some time to explore this awesome city.