Melitta Mid-Crits

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As some of you may remember, I go to school sometimes too (hee, hee). On that note, the design project I am involved in with the product design department has quite a story to go with it, which, if you want to hear I will tell you (send me a message). The project details go a little something like this: Melitta and Fachhochschule Coburg got in contact (somehow, I don’t know… this was last year some time), and decided to work together developing new product ideas for Melitta. Result: Melitta’s happy because they get free creative labor, fresh ideas from a new perspective and the school’s happy because it gets to develop cool, fresh ideas for a big name-brand, and the *students* are happy because *they* can put it in their portfolio! So… now that the project’s been going on for about 2 months, we all went to pay a visit to their German headquarters in Minden to show them how we are progressing.
I woke up on the 9th at way-too-early-for-any-normal-person 3 in the morning so I could catch the bus at school that took us on the 5 hour trip. Students from both 4th semester (the ones I’m working with) and 8th semester studies went, as each class is working on a different project. There ended up being about 25 of us.
When we got there, they very, very thankfully served us coffee (surprise, I know), and the 4th semester students launched right into the PowerPoint presentations, while the 8th semester students got a tour of the filter-making factory. 11 presentations later was lunch, and then we switched places. The sad thing is, there were no cameras allowed in the factory, or else I would have taken lots of pictures for you to see, including a picture of the guy who was welding a broken paper pulp hopper in the same room as lots and lots of hay bale-sized bricks of said paper pulp - safety first! I was impressed to a degree with their employee cafeteria, but there goes the space planner in me talking again. I’ve included pictures anyway, in case you’re into that kind of stuff, too… Got back home about 10pm, and couldn’t have been happier to see a pair of pyjamas.

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Photos

The bus
About half way through our trip, most people woke up from their naps.

Inside the conference room
can't you just see everyone thinking 'let's sit down already so I can have a cuppa joe?' We were so tired, and most people had only slept on the bus because they were up preparing their presentations the night before!

Inside the conference room
Presentations...

Melitta cafeteria
No, nothing special-looking, it\'s true, but they tried very hard to provide satisfying meals - you could tell they honestly thought about keeping their employees happy during the day.

Melitta cafeteria
For my fellow classmates out there... they had this web enabled lounge with a coffee bar that was just off the cafeteria. Although it looked like it didn't get a whole lot of use...

Melitta cafeteria
More of the lounge.... it had a happy little map of all the buildings in the Melitta complex.

Minden
On the way home, we ran into this outstandingly long traffic jam. People get pretty feisty on the autobahn when they get caught behind a truck or a big bus... there were cars passing us on the left shoulder!