Coco Kajima

25

Digital Designer

Flat 255,

25th Floor

Old HSBC Tower Building

Canary Wharf

London

UTM
30U 706909 5710046

There is plenty of decent residential space in the old financial district at Canary Wharf. The river provides excellent transport links to the rest of London, especially now the network of flood relief canals is complete. Despite the odds, London has remained one of the key global centres for design and technology. Finally, there is the prospect of excellent views across the city.

A converted office block, previously used by a financial institution for trading. It's been re-clad with the latest Photo-Voltaic glazing, which generates enough power for all the day-to-day items (display screens, phone chargers, even the lifts). The lift service is great for a residential building, even through several of them have been removed to put in extra plumbing and a mechanical cycle storage system. What used to be the underground car park has been converted to a boat yard, where residents can store their cycling and rowing boats. All the old air-conditioning has been removed from the upper floors and replaced with water storage tanks. The old 'dealer' raised floors and suspended ceilings which were installed when the building was built have been replaced with highly effective insulation, meaning that even a single occupant (and their associated electronics) is enough to keep each flat warm. An airship dock was added to the very top of the building, which is great for making those long distance journeys. A couple of high altitude tethered communications balloons also provide great high-bandwidth communications, when it isn't too windy!



The old podium structure at the bottom of the building has been converted to an indoor hydroponic farm, which grows most of the food for the building inhabitants using nuclear energy shipped in on the electricity grid.

Coco lives on her own, though sometimes her boyfriend Rob visits for extended periods of time. As he lives in San Francisco he tends to come for 3 months at a stretch, travelling over on the long distance solar airship. The journey can take up to a week, but thanks to modern communications technology they're never out of touch.



Coco's also got a lot of close friends who live nearby (some even in the same building!). Most of her university classmates have also moved to Europe, clustering in Paris, Milan and Geneva. At the weekends it's not uncommon for her to have two or three friends make the journey overnight on Friday to spend Saturday and Sunday staying with her.



The rest of her building is mostly inhabited by young professionals. Generally they're not (yet) the married type, although there are a few who haven't yet moved out to 'the country'. There are also more than a few retired and semi-retired people, both single and couples, who have either moved back into the city after raising their families, or never left in the first places.



Pets are still a little frowned upon in multiple occupancy dwellings, especially now there isn't much left in the way of parks and green spaces for them to 'get out' to. She makes do with her house AI, which thanks to a few tweaks by her (and Rob when he has spare time) is quite cute!



For Christmas, Coco always goes back to visit her parents in Japan! Again she catches the solar airship for long distance (as it's so much faster than sail-boats).

Coco doesn't really have a conventional office. She works out of a top floor studio in Shoreditch 2-3 days a week, when she needs an immersive environment in which to work. The rest of the time (typically another 2-2.5 days each week) when she's not visiting clients or production facilities, she either works from home, coffee shops, university sites or public libraries.



Her main mode of travel is bicycle. The network of elevated cycle lanes is generally the quickest way from A-B through town when travelling light. The cycle lanes are fully enclosed with the latest PV glazing, so bad weather doesn't cause a problem and the 'same-direction' airflow system not only makes people go that bit faster, but also keeps everyone cool during all but the hottest days of the year. When it's time for Coco to come home, the PV cells are actively charged with electricity to provide lighting all the way home. Since mandatory AI guidance systems came into force, crashes in the cycle lanes are virtually un-heard of. The only thing that Coco needs to provide is the kinetic energy to move her bike along.



When there's something fragile, heavy or bulky to be carried (samples, shopping or even babies - though not for Coco just yet!) boat is the only way to travel. It's quite a bit slower than the cycle highways, but there are still some who only travel this way as it's 'less stressful than the two wheeled rat-race'. The latest generation of boats have fully motorised canopies, providing protection from rain, wind and waves when it isn't so nice outside. Again, nowadays most people choose to pedal their boats, but you still see the occasional person rowing! Some areas of the Thames are still tidal and the current in the canals can be quite strong after a heavy rainstorm, so sometimes it pays to pick your moments when taking the boat.



Coco's biggest trip of the year (since she moved to Europe) is back to Japan at Christmas, when she makes the 5 day journey by solar powered airship. She also takes the airship for business (and personal) travel to Europe, and anything more than about a 2 hour cycle from her flat.

Coco normally starts her day at about 8 in the morning, Mondays to Fridays. Right now she's going through a forest and birdsong phase, so that's all she likes to wake up to each morning. Her particular favourite from last week was the Tomakomai forest on Hokkaido, as it reminded her of childhood holidays back home.



The first journey of the day is always the lift (normally down to the podium, though sometimes she jumps straight into an airship). The podium deck is pretty extensive, Coco's building has two convenience stores and three cafe's, all of which are run by other residents in the tower. If time allows she likes to sit and eat her breakfast in Joe's Cafe (the best for breakfast, in her opinion.. ). It's refreshing to queue and order food at the counter from another human, tablet's are great - but there's still nothing that can beat a friendly smile from another person to start the day.



All told, it takes Coco about 20 minutes to digest her coffee, muesli and all the messages she received overnight. When she's nearly finished her reading, the tablet AI calls her bike out of storage so it will be ready in about 5 minutes. Despite all the latest technological developments (and the drastic changes in the world, even witnessed in her 25 years) Coco thinks it's still rather a long way to walk from Joe's to the cycle gate. Surely the architects could have come up with a better configuration when they re-designed the tower for residential use?



Cycling to work was great, but for anything less than a 20 minute journey Coco usually walks. The weather outside isn't always, or even often all that great, but just occasionally it is too good to miss a taking a stroll in. The prospect of getting soaked in a freak shower on the way back from a local bar also adds an uncertainty to life, which sometimes is just priceless.



Coco normally goes to her favourite sandwich shop, just round the corner from work, each day for lunch. Quite where they manage to get such delicious Brie from she doesn't know. It's also nice to take a break from the immersive environment after a morning's work, even when it's cold and wet in the real world.



Cycling for 40 minutes a day keeps her pretty fit, but everyone likes to go for a run now and then. The canal paths are great for a sunny summers evening, or when it's too hot or cold outside there are trails through the hydroponic gardens which are nearly as good as outside.

Socialising happens all the time. Though mostly you can't see it!



Real time virtual interaction is the dominant mode of communication between Coco, her friends, relatives and colleagues. Coco thinks of it just like being in the sea. All the time she's swimming around, splashing and making waves (some bigger than others). It's like a giant shared stream of consciousness, everything from discussions of new political ideas to social meetings with friends for coffee and a chat.



Generally Coco makes it to the pub (or a bar, if she's feeling rich!) for an evening out with her friends once or twice a week. The thing she likes most about living not too far away from the centre of the city is being able to invite friends, colleagues and neighbours back to her place for dinner. Her speciality is fresh rhubarb tart, all ingredients come from the podium hydroponic garden of course!



Maybe it's a consequence of her Japanese upbringing, but Coco likes to think of everyone on the floor of her residence as a team. They run a couple of projects for the wider community each year, helping out with old people in the countryside, teaching a few lessons to school children. Afterwards they always make sure to have a big party! Sometimes it can be a big task to organise, but actually Coco really enjoys it.

Coco spends the largest proportion of her day talking to her boyfriend Rob. He works in the start-up industry over there, still the biggest and most successful US export of recent times. While he's supposed to have a normal office job, working normal hours, he's usually up till the very early hours of the morning writing code for his latest project. Sometimes Coco jokes that he's practically nocturnal! However she doesn't complain, as it means he's often still up when she's logging in to her immersive environment at work. Mostly they communicate through video calls, or voice chat when on the move (and just before bed Coco goes to bed!). He sometimes logs in to her work after she's gone home and change the graphics and colour scheme of her workspace. The roses he made her last valentines went down very well indeed!



When she isn't talking to her significant other, or her work colleagues, Coco spends a lot of time on video calls to her parents. Sunday mornings and weekday evenings are the best times, both her parents are quite early risers which helps. Best of all, Coco loves to see her cat Aiko, which her parents look after for her now - although it still bugs her that she can't stroke him through the screen (yet!).



It doesn't apply to all of them, but mostly Coco sees her colleagues as friends. They pool information about everything work related, and quite a lot that has nothing to do with work directly. She bought her latest bike through a friend of a colleague and quite often relies on this network for finding out 'what's hot' and 'what's not' for the weekend!

Apart from the daily commute (to her studio, or clients predominantly London based offices), Coco doesn't travel that often. Once, or sometimes twice a month she has to travel outside London to visit a larger factory, and for special occasions like birthdays, she likes to visit her friends in continental Europe.



When she finished her studies at the Tokyo Institute of Technology she took a year out to travel the world with three of her closest friends from her course. They bought a 4 person airship with the last of their student loans and headed off in search of discovery! Each of them made a list of sights (everything from flying over sea at the North Pole to the visiting the Inca temples of South America) and they planned a year of fantastic adventures. They faced a few challenges and had a couple of disagreements with her friends along the way, but overall Coco still thinks it was absolutely the trip of a life time! She'd quite like to do something similar (though probably just for 2-3 months) before she gets married and settles down properly.

As a child Coco and her parents explored their native Japan quite extensively. Bullet trains running on nuclear electricity are still unbeaten as the fastest mode of surface travel. Her favourite excursions were the twice yearly trips to visit her grandparents on Hokkaido. In the summer she would go for long walks with her mother, picking berries and collecting wild flowers to press. Wintertime was the complete opposite, daily skiing lessons with her father, though it's been a long time since she, or anyone else on the planet got anywhere near 'real' snow. These days when she's visiting her parents for Christmas she takes her father to the Sendai Snow-Dome as a reminder of old times.



Working as a designer, Coco's work takes her to Milan, Geneva and Paris at least once each a year. Normally it's airship all the way there and back, sometimes she has to travel at night because of work schedules.

Apart from her annual trip home to Japan for Christmas and the round the world trip she did after graduation, the furthest Coco has been was to visit Rob in San Francisco for a month, though that was nearly two years ago now. When she was visiting, he took two weeks off work and they made a road trip down south to Mexico. Electric cars have come a long way, even since 2040, though it's still expensive to get insurance when you're only 23!



On their way to Mexico they stopped at all the major sights, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, the old Hoover Dam (it was still a highly impressive structure, even if Lake Mead had dried up back in 2014) and of course made the necessary pilgrimages (for all scientists, engineers and designers) to Silicon Valley and the Feynman institute at CalTech.



Coco thought that Mexico was still a little behind the US in terms of home comforts, even though they only stayed south of the border for a couple of days. By the end of the day she couldn't wait to park the car back on a sailboat and cruise back to the bay!

Coco really wants to visit the new lunar base. It's colonists only at the moment, but in a couple of years they'll probably open up for tourists. Mars also looks appealing, but she really can't stand to spend the four week journey in such a low bandwidth zone. The four minute latency isn't such a problem whilst en-route, but having to wait 8 minutes for round trip communication to earth when you're on the surface would be a real deal-breaker for any work related conferences.



The main reason Coco wants to go to the moon is to have a go at un-assisted flight. The new base has a huge enclosed fly dome, maintained to 90% atmospheric pressure with 18% oxygen. Strap on a pair of polystyrene composite wings and you can (after a bit of practice!) fly like a bird just by flapping your arms.



During her year of travelling after university, Coco visited more or less every place she had ever wanted to visit, so there isn't much 'left' for her to see. Though she still enjoys going to visit amazing places with her friends, especially Rob.

Yesterday Coco had a fresh pomello fruit from Indonesia for breakfast! It took her half an hour to peel it all, there was enough left over for an afternoon snack as well. It's quite rare that airships bring in fresh fruit from overseas, but sometimes there's a space on a back-haul run and more or less anything can turn up.



Coco took the pledge to be 6/7ths vegeterian as part of the funding agreement for her university education. Before this she used to eat meat two days a week! One of her favourite parts of studying at university was the mandatory 1/2 day each week shift in the residence hydroponics facility, together with the communal meals she used to prepare with the other 6 students on her floor several times each week for the whole four years of her studies. It was like a big social dinner party, usually with lots of friends and visitors at least once a week. It was at one of these parties that she'd met her boyfriend Rob..



Food is central to Coco's life. She spends about 50% of her income (after tax) on food each month, the remaining 50% being split evenly between housing costs, consumables (anything from computers to clothes) and entertainment (socialising with friends, buying downloadable content and very occasionally dining out) and saving for the future. Apart from the food portion, she tries to give away 10% of her income overall each month to 'good causes'. When she can't do this in the form of cash, she gives away her old (but still useful to somone) stuff or donates unused download rights to charities in exchange.

Coco really likes pomello. It's certainly her favourite fruit, though now practically impossible to get hold of on a regular basis. Hydroponics can't grow everything just like nature, not quite yet at any rate. As for a full meal, though she knows it isn't very environmentally correct to admit, Coco loves a plate of Shiga beef, prepared sashimi style, with rice and green beans on the side. Her favourite garnish is soy sauce with ginger and wasabi. Again, hydroponics aren't great for growing horseradishes, so getting hold of decent wasabi in London requires quite a lot of work.



Coco's never eaten tuna. Apparently there are still a few in the southern pacific ocean, but fishing them has been outlawed for longer than Coco's been alive. When she was little, she remembers her grandma used to tell stories about preparing sushi with fish fresh from the dock. Coco things the tuna looks like such a big scary fish, from the old photo's she's seen. Farmed salmon is just about okay, when she can afford to buy fish at all, but she'd really like to get something wild that once lived in the ocean. Scientists say that one day tuna stocks may recover to a point where they can support fishing again, but probably not in our lifetime.

Coco holds a masters degree in integrated digital and physical system design from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. She studied a 4 year straight masters programme, covering the undergraduate elements in the first three years with the masters elements in the final year. In her first two years she studied Pure Maths, Statistics, Physics and Natural Sciences. The third year programme was focused on digital system design, programming and robotics assisted manufacture, with specialist courses and a major project in the final year.



In her fourth year Coco specialised in communications systems and devices design. For her project she built a prototype portable immersive system, capable of being fitted to conventional glasses or contact lenses. Before graduating she wrote a paper with her supervisor on portable immersive systems for augmented reality experiences in extreme environments and emergency situations.



Coco would like to do a second masters degree in art, specifically painting. At the moment she doesn't have enough time or money to sign up for a course, though maybe when she settles down she'll get round to it.

Coco earns about 4000 euros a month before tax. Her take home pay is just under half of this, after she pays for the general taxes, the various local hypothecated taxes, national insurance and her student loan. This isn't a bad salary for a designer only three years out of university.

The most expensive thing Coco has 'bought' so far was her degree, although this was mostly paid for up front by the Japanese government with an interest free loan. She's paying it back at the moment, hopefully she'll have it covered before it's time to take out a mortgage.

The next most expensive thing she's ever bought is the share of her current London flat (a necessary condition for taking up the tenancy), again this is taken in the form of a large interest free loan from the Building Residence Owners Association, with a set proportion to be paid back each month. As the building is so energy efficient, the interest repayments on the full value of all the loans are covered by the surplus energy generated on site, with a slight off-set to cover the cost of nuclear baseload for the hydroponic farm.

Third on the list (but a long way down in terms of relative cost) would be the quarter share of the airship Coco bought just before graduation. It drained the remainder of her student loan, and she took a small loss overall (due to the wear and tear incurred during her year of travelling), but they still managed to get a good price for what was a very serviceable vehicle after a year of adventures.

Coco isn't too fussed about material wealth. Like everyone, her biggest expense is food (because she enjoys it and what she buys is nice and more often than not also good for her!), which doesn't leave much for 'needless consumption', rapid acquisition and cycling of consumer products. The world is still struggling to deal with the masses of non-recyclable waste produced even up to the late 2030's. Everything Coco buys is eventually recycled, so she doesn't see much point in building up a vast collection of objects (all of which she has to pay for and store), when they're going to be re-used anyway and she probably won't have time to enjoy them fully.



She does enjoy having a fast bicycle, it cost her 1400 euros, but should last at least 5 years and saves her probably 5 minutes each day she uses it, relative to a cheaper, slower model. She can understand why individuals might want to spend even more for something fast, comfortable or flashy, but ultimately it would still have to be durable. Sometimes she wishes she was more heavily into programming and could make her fortune with a 'killer app', these days there seems to be at least a five or six thousand net-millionaires. These guys (still mostly guys..) literally live the high-life with their private airships drifting from city to city. However, carrying capacity in airships for semi-permanent dwellings is still very limited, so at least they don't have that much stuff either in terms of weight. Though one day she thinks she'd like to have her own airship too, if she could come up with a really cutting edge design or a new platform technology. It would be great for family holidays!

Coco still uses a little more than one planet, probably about 1.1 or 1.2 (depending upon if she's feeling lazy or cold!). Of this, the balance, and a little more (sometimes as much as 0.3 planet's worth of energy), comes from nuclear power. So whilst it isn't sustainable in the true meaning of the word, Coco (and 90% of the global population) are relatively happy that this state of affairs should be stable enough to survive the next 5-6000 years. The nuclear waste generated is a bit problematic, but now that it's powered by a dedicated geothermal backed power system, the active cooling system is secure and carbon neutral. These days all the other energy everyone uses is either renewable sourced electricity of from short cycle carbon sources. At least in carbon terms she's living at 0.9 planets, and whilst it's never good to rely on a technological intervention to save your civilisation, provided someone develops fusion to a useable point before fission resources run out, the climate and energy crisis should be well under control.



Water (and sewage) treatment is the largest part of Coco's energy budget - washing, drinking and most importantly irrigating plants in the hydroponic farm. The second largest item is low latency data storage, 100Tb is quite a lot for a 25 year old, although it comes with the territory of a career in digital design. Despite advances in storage systems, it still has to live somewhere (actually in two different secure locations). Keeping all this Solid State Disks cool, dry and on-line 365 days a year requires a significant quantity of electricity. On the positive side, the latest generation of SSD systems have been designed to include multi-purpose processors which can drive Coco's immersive environment when she's in the studio and has cached all the data she needs locally. Computer processing power for her work is the highest peak energy demand during Coco's day, even bigger than the hot showers she loves in the morning!



Sometimes overnight airship flights are a business necessity, but nowadays they all use short cycle bio-diesel. It's still not the cleanest way to travel, but once or twice a year it normally can't be avoided.

Coco likes to draw, in her spare time and even in the margins of her notebooks during work meetings and conferences. Mostly it's black and white as adding colour just takes too much time. When she was younger she used to design and sew her own dresses together. Since moving to London she hasn't had time to indulge in this (yet). Like most of the under 30's, Coco also spends an hour or so each day social networking.



Politics is a big interest for a lot of people in the design community these days and Coco is no different. At the moment she's just an avid observer from the sidelines, but one day she would like to get involved. Things are still a little difficult because of her status as a Japanese citizen, but more and more the electorate is beginning to realise that global problems require global solutions and it's the answers and the implementation that counts, not the nationality of those in power.



To keep fit (not that much is really necessary with all the cycling and pedal boating she does), Coco likes to take out old fashioned rowing boats for a spin on the Thames. Nothing beats a few miles of rowing in the early morning sunshine.

Coco likes pink. Actually Coco loves pink. She's had matching lipstick and nail gloss in her favourite shade of Pantone 241 since she was 15. She doesn't wear it that often, but it lives in her handbag all the time and she keeps a couple of spares at home just in case!

Live music, played by and with friends is her favourite. One of her colleagues has an old town house on the hill near Greenwich with a Piano in the dining room. Every so often a few of them go round for dinner and a sing song afterwards. Her favourite instrument is the violin, closely followed by the acoustic guitar (closely followed again by the electric guitar!). Coco wishes she could play violin properly, but for now she's content with playing a few chords on her great-grandfathers hand-me-down Gibson acoustic. Despite being nearly a hundred years old it's still a beautiful instrument though the edges are a little chipped!



Pop music is okay, but Coco has also has real soft spot for 'classic rock' music from the 1960's, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.

Coco has just finished reading "The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism" by Ellie Levenson. It was an interesting insight into the way women saw their roles in society at the turn of the millennium, a useful reference for the ongoing political gender equality debates. Since all books were digitised in the 2030's, deciding what to read is quite difficult! This choice was a recommendation from the secretary at her studio, who's something of a womens activist and political firebrand. When not reading recommendations from other people, Coco has been working her way through the Raymond Chandler back catalogue over the last three years.

Coco doesn't think much about technology. The underlying systems, structures and architectures haven't changed much in the last 15 years. For her the crucial thing is the development of new thinking and fresh ideas. Technology is just a means of implementing these new concepts, it's the concept themselves that have actually moved society forward over the last 40 years. Coco is obviously very interested in the creation of new ideas, ultimately it's how she earns her her living in design.

PV glazing has been single most important development of the last 30 years, without it electricity would be in very short supply. The re-development of airships in the 2040's has also been something of a crucial milestone. Coco still remembers her parents old photos of streets with cars in! Quite how people came up with the idea that everyone could own their own car and have the 'right' to drive it wherever and whenever they chose is still something of a mystery to her. Surely the problem of immense and intractable traffic congestion should have been obvious? Cycle highways are now the life blood of city commuters. The ability to travel at 30 Kilometres per hour from A-B absolutely carbon free, come rain, shine or wind has been a real boon to everyone. There are still a couple of mass transit lines in London, but mostly they are used by the few non-cyclists (whether they choose not to or aren't physically able).



Though you can't touch it (only the devices where it lives) Coco's AI is also vitally important to the way she lives her life. It handles her data storage, runs her finances, controls her environment (both at home and at work) and helps plan her day. Quite how people managed to fit all this complexity into a paper diary in years gone by she doesn't understand! If Coco had been alive all those years ago, she's sure she would have missed a lot of appointments and got lost at least once a week.

Coco is a Christian, which is quite unusual these days. It's been in her family since about the 1950's when her great grandfather converted from Shintoism and persuaded the whole family to change with him. This has quite a strong bearing on how she sees her relationships with others.



In addition to doing her best to respect God and her fellow humans, Coco considers herself to be a guardian of the earths natural environment. Perhaps her religious background gives her a different perspective (protecting God's earth, rather than just the planet she happens to find herself on), she's not quite sure about this. Whatever the motivation, Coco sees it as her personal responsibility to live in a way which respects the environment and doesn't destroy it for future generations. Sometimes she thinks that this duty is even more important than her religious faith.



It applies to literally everything she does, from the way she cleans her teeth in the morning to the way she behaves at work. The thing she likes most about her current studio is that they will back her 100% on the idea of 'not destroying the planet' for economic gain. Things have improved almost immeasurably even in the last 10 years, but there are still a few employers who aren't actually implementing this philosophy, despite statements to the contrary. One day she hopes to hand over the planet to her children in a better state than it was when she 'inherited' it. The thought of people going around and destroying it to make money actually makes her quite angry.. best to change the subject.

Coco was brought up in Chiba, a little way outside Tokyo. She can remember when it used to snow in the winter (and all those skiing lessons with her father), though it's been over 8 years now since it actually snowed anywhere currently inhabited. Her parents raised her with 'traditional' values, working hard, a focus on scientific education, being encouraged to experiment and take things apart (not exactly typical for a little girl!). She used to cycle to school on the roads, though mostly they were full of electric (and even now and then a fully automated) delivery trucks. Japan was quite slow in adopting enclosed cycle highways, possibly because the ageing population wouldn't have benefited that much!



After school, when there wasn't any homework and the weather was sunny she used to explore the neighbourhood orchards with her cat Aiko. She used to love holidays in Hokkaido. The only thing she really misses (apart from Aiko, who she misses quite a lot!) from her childhood is the extra meat allowance she exchanged in part for her university education.

Sometimes Coco is too quiet! She feels really strongly about lots of things but doesn't always have the courage to say them out loud. Other times she's possibly too outspoken and has offended more than a few people in the past. Overall, she finds it hard to be disciplined, in terms of making her design work 'better' through the application of diligent process - her natural talent normally carries her through, though she worries that it won't be enough to carry her to the 'design superstar' status she secretly craves. She can also be really really stubborn (which in the past has even done her out of a job!).



Sometimes she wishes she could think more quickly! Formal written communication in English (for work and all those other things that you still need to send emails for) is still a challenge for her, despite speaking it every day for 15 years now. Not that she can't do it, she just wishes that the right words and tone would come more quickly, so she didn't sometimes have to stay up half the night re-drafting each and every little bit before finally pressing the send button.

Coco want to get married and have kids. Some of her friends, and especially the secretary at her office sometimes deride this as a 'traditional' aspiration, but Coco's always been happy with it as something she wanted to do. For now she's just waiting for her boyfriend to propose, hopefully he'll do it soon and she can move to San Francisco, or possibly they can set up home in a completely new place together.

Coco cares deeply about the environment, human rights and freedoms. She loves the beautiful sunsets over the city she can see from her bedroom window. She's also passionate about good design, thinking things through before setting out on a new idea - and once the first attempt is on the screen, rigourously testing it electronically before deciding whether or not it's worth progressing.



Coco is also really passionate about the colour pink. Sometimes at school it occasionally took over her thoughts and she ended up with less than top marks. When she gets a proper house, she'd like to have a whole room that's just pink!

Fun, wilful, thoughtful, hard-working, original, and (sometimes just a little bit) crazy.

Coco's most passionate belief is that the human race must survive. She wants to preserve the world for future generations and take part in building the culture and history of a civilisation that will stretch as far as she can imagine into the future. When she considers the world without this belief, she is without any hope for future generations.



She also believes that humans are not, and never will be quite perfect, but that we still have to try our best.



Sometimes she also likes to think that a few of the things she designs will stand the test of time, at least enough to be considered as a reference point by designers in the distant future.



Even in 2050 some thing it's a bit far fetched, but Coco would like to live long enough to see a meaningful human presence on Mars and serious planetary colonisation missions beyond the solar system.