The Race Of Innovation For Emirates Team New Zealand

While the America’s Cup is a test of sailing skill, strategy and teamwork played out on the water and counted by milliseconds, it is also a test of technology, design, innovation and engineering played out over years of development. One of those at the front line of this race for innovation is Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) Head of Design, Dan Bernasconi, who leads a team of 35 designers and engineers who have not only helped shape the America’s Cup, but also future sailing innovation and beyond.

We talk to Dan about the Emirates Team New Zealand partnership with HP, the power of using HP Z Workstations for sailing simulations, how HP ZBook laptops allow the team to keep mobile, using HP Jet Fusion 3D printing technology to create components on the fly, and what this could all mean for other opportunities for New Zealand.

Can you talk a little bit about the design process now and how it has changed since the last America’s Cup campaign?

If I give a little bit of history on that, when I started in yacht design, it was still halfway between an art and a science and the head of the design team was an extremely experienced yacht designer. His process was largely using his experience of what worked and what didn’t and slowly trying new things and seeing if they made a quicker boat.

Now we’ve moved more and more into simulation and, going back to our first foiling campaign, the AC72s, that was about looking at the boat when it’s up and foiling in steady speed, steady conditions and just trying to get the optimum speed in a straight line. Then going to the Bermuda campaign, we realised that there’s so much performance through the accelerations, the take-offs, the tacks, the gybes.

Rather than just trying to model the boat when it’s in a perfect steady condition, we were modelling the boat with all of the dynamics and to do that, we needed the sailors to be involved. We developed simulators that the sailors could sit in and control the yacht much as they’re doing around a racecourse, like a flight simulator. We’re basing our design decisions on simulator lap time, rather than simulator straight line speed. Going into this campaign, we’ve continued to push that forward.

I think what’s really different about this campaign is that the boat class is very open. It’s a completely new class of boat. When we started this campaign, there had never been a large foiling monohull. With the class being open, we’ve had to get back into some of the more traditional areas of naval architecture, like designing the hull shapes and designing sails and the sails have been a really big part of this, whereas in the previous two Cups, the boats have been driven by rigid wings, so we’re back into soft sails.

What’s been great for us is to apply all this technology that we’ve been developing over the years alongside HP, in simulations and simulators, to those new areas of hull design, designing the boat for take-off and really shaping the hull as much for aerodynamics as for hydrodynamics, because it’s an aircraft most of the time.

Designing the shapes of the sails and the hull all to work together to be a really efficient aerodynamic aircraft has been a big change.

Is there still that art there though?

Every decision we make is based on performance, whether that’s structural performance, aerodynamic, hydrodynamic. Of course, it’s great when you do that and the boat ends up looking cool, but it’s more a product of the process.

I think the boats do look really cool and maybe that’s helped by nature. Something which is fast and streamlined is naturally pretty pleasing to the eye. We’ve just launched one of our latest foils and when you look at that front on, it’s uncannily similar to the silhouette of an albatross, the way the wings blend into the body and the streamline shape. So, although we don’t deliberately put any effort on the aesthetics, it’s a by-product.

Have you been inspired as a designer by nature and some of those things that naturally develop for speed?

Yeah, for sure. It’s hard to compete with millions of years of evolution. You definitely are inspired by shapes of birds and fish. There are aspects of yacht design and research which do compare things in nature to drag.

Some whales have these features called tubercles on their fins, which are concave scallops, which, when you first look at them, you think, ‘why are they like that?’ But then if you do some very detailed fluid dynamic studies on it, you actually find that it’s a way of improving the performance of the fins. Another example is that the skin of fish and dolphins is incredibly low drag, so there’s definitely lessons to be learned by looking at nature.

With all the variables that you need to take into the simulation, what sort of computing power is required for that? And is that something that you would have been able to have done, even a couple of years ago?

We have a cluster of HP Z Workstations in our base. We’ve got eight HP Z Workstations with around 500 cores to help process highly technical computational fluid dynamics modelling. All of our simulation is done on that, whereas five or 10 years ago, we would have had an offsite computing cluster taking up a full room and using a huge amount of electrical power. Now that’s something that we’ve just got under a desk.

We push it very hard. We’re using it all the time for hydrodynamic and aerodynamic analysis and having it on site and having the HP New Zealand team literally around the corner to support that, has made a massive difference to our productivity.

With some of the other HP tools you have on hand, such as the 3D printing and even the laptops that you have on the chase boats, what does it mean to be able to just come up with an iteration and then print it out so easily?

The 3D printing is completely game changing for us. We did have a 3D printer in the last campaign, but it was very rudimentary and we made very little use of it because the quality of the parts just was not there.

The HP Jet Fusion 580 Color 3D Printer that we’ve got now, we are just getting so much use out of it. We’re running full print jobs on it every two or three days. We can send the designs to the printer overnight and 12 hours later the parts are ready to be pushed out on the boat, going from dreams to reality in often under 24 hours. HP Multi Jet Fusion Technology gives us a real competitive edge to innovate at speed.

We started off just using it for prototypes or for models and now we’re printing parts which are very much part of the yacht. They’re actually real components that we use on the yacht, from hydraulic fittings, things that are taking hydraulic pressure with screw threads on. Things that we would previously have had to get machined, we’re just printing out overnight. The controllers that the sailors use, mechanisms, housings for other electronic components, measurement devices, little widgets and gadgets all over the yacht are 3D printed.

There’s many things on the yacht which we wouldn’t be able to do without that. It’s taken us awhile to really understand the full potential because our engineering designers are very used to designing things that can be manufactured in traditional methods. Typically starting with a solid block of metal and then coming into it from various angles with a drill effectively and cutting away material until you end up with what you need.

With 3D printing, you’re doing it completely the other way. There are parts that you can design and make, which are just physically impossible to make through machining because they’re things that don’t have the constraints of needing to be drilled from the outside.

It’s taken a while for us to really understand the full potential, both in the way things are made, but also the range of applications. It’s totally changed our design process. I can’t imagine being without that now.

As you’re saying, the design process is often defined by the production process, but being totally free of that, do you feel like there’s going to be more innovation that comes just from that 3D printing side and not being constrained by the production?

Yeah, for sure. The HP Jet Fusion 580 Color 3D Printer that we’ve been using this campaign is a PA-12 nylon printer, which is a pretty strong material. But HP is soon launching the next step in 3D printing, which is the HP Metal Jet. That will be another step forward again, being able to build or print completely structural parts out of metal, without the constraints of machining, will be huge for us.

Could you imagine being able to have done what you’ve needed to do to be ready for this race, in the world of COVID when supply chains are all buggered, without 3D?

I’m sure we would have got a boat onto the start line, but it would be a very different boat and it would be several generations behind where we are now. We’re iterating at an incredible rate, we’re making changes daily. Being able to go out on the water one day, learn something, iterate that part and then have another one to test for when we’re on the water the next day or the day after, is just massive.

Each time we go out on the water, we learn a load of new information. We can have up to six engineers out on the chase boats monitoring performance in real-time utilizing HP ZBooks [mobile workstations].

Data and video from cameras and sensors mounted on the boat is also being monitored and crunched by the cluster of powerful HP Z Workstations back at base. All that data helps make tiny adjustments to sail, foil and hull designs, among other things, so the team can immediately see how functional 3D printed parts have performed and adjust using the HP Jet Fusion 580 Color 3D Printer. You can’t buy that. It’s time that’s the most critical thing.

When you talk about the power of simulation and all of those variables, does it still feel like a distinct thing though, to still go out on the water and get that insight?

That’s a good question. Probably, of all the people on the team, I’m one of the least excited about going on the water to learn something because I’m such a strong believer in simulation. If you go back to the IACC monohulls, everything was about two-boat testing. You’d get on the water and you’d line the two boats up and you have one as a baseline and change things on the other.
We don’t do that at all now. We’re always on our own on the water. We’ve never had two boats sailing at the same time during this campaign and so any design decision; what foil, whether we should go with foil A, B or C or sails A, B or C, it’s all based on simulation. It is important still to go out because if you’ve got a simulation which perfectly models every aspect of the physics, then you can retire, but we’re always trying to improve those.

Rather than going out on the water to see whether A is faster than B, we’re mostly going out on the water to see where the reality differs from the simulation. We have a huge number of sensors on the yacht and we’re monitoring all of those in real time with our HP ZBook laptops on the chase boat. We do really detailed analysis of that data and the main output of that is to validate some aspects of simulation and put the spotlight on others.

Right this morning, just before coming into this interview, I was in a discussion with four or five of our engineers and we were looking at pretty subtle differences in boat speed between the two foils that we have at the moment. We’ve got one generation of foil on one side of the boat and another on the other side. We were just looking at some data from the previous day’s sailing on the loads, the flap angles, speeds, and comparing that with simulation and then asking ourselves the question, why in simulation have we got a flap angle of 3.5 and on the water, we had a flap panel of 4.2? When we know that we’re carrying seven and a half tons of boat, we know exactly how fast it was moving, so there’s some mismatch there.

By being able to dig into that and work out where that mismatch is ultimately improves the simulation. If you can improve the simulation, then you’re improving its ability to tell you what’s a good design and what isn’t. That ultimately leads to better design.

In terms of the other teams and the variations within the designs, whether it’s the foil design, the sails, the hull, was there anything that surprised you?

The hulls of the other teams are really different to each other. We kind of expected that with the first generation of boats. Everyone’s starting from a clean sheet and, because it takes a year to build a boat, there wasn’t that long between the rule coming out and having to commit to the hull shape. So it’s probably not that surprising that the first generation of hulls were really diverse.
What’s a bit more of a surprise to us is that the second generation is still really diverse. There hasn’t been much convergence towards a particular shape. There are a few features that everyone has got the same conclusion on.

I think the other thing that surprises us a bit is, compared to our team, some of the others have not made massive changes between their generations of hulls and foils. Luna Rossa, for instance, when we first saw their second hull shape, we were like, ‘Is that really a new hull? Or have they just modified their first one?’ It took us a few minutes to actually work out that it was the second boat, it’s very, very similar.

American Magic’s foils are all pretty similar to each other. I’m sure they’ve got better and there’s a lot of improvements we can’t see, but our approach when we first launched was we knew we were only going to build six foils in the whole campaign, they’re really complex and expensive items.

The rule allows anything, from a foil that is completely flat to an anhedral one. It wasn’t completely clear to us in our analysis which is better when we started out, so we thought, ‘Let’s build one of each.’ With our first boat, we launched with a straight one on one side and an anhedral one on the other. Every foil we’ve made since then has been really different to the one before, because there’s a huge design space and we just wanted to cover every direction we could go in until we had got to the final date where we had to make a decision for our two race foils.

Now our two race foils are not actually identical at the moment. They might end up identical, but even at this stage, our two race foils will have small differences between them so we can compare them and then we may modify one to be the same as the other.

We were surprised when everyone else launched their first boat, that they seem to have matching foils and maybe they were more confident about their design direction in a way, so they did maybe less exploration of the design space. That’s been surprising for us.

With that first hull, there must be a lot of pressure with that. How do you start to get something down to commit to?

When we wrote the rule, we put in some constraints. It is a monohull, so for instance, in the rule there’s something to prohibit you from effectively building a catamaran. The boat has to be a certain length.

There’s some features there for safety and stability, so there’s a minimum required bow volume. I’m really glad that we put that in because we’ve had some big capsizes, but there’s never been a pitch-pole and that would potentially be a lot more dangerous. That’s because the rule requires you to have a lot of volume in the bow to hopefully try and prevent that.

First of all, we developed a hull which met all the rules. So even that is not completely trivial to something which ticks all of the boxes that you need to tick. We then create simulations around that and start making changes.

You start off with some really simple changes; do you make it more curved or more vee’d? You just run it through the simulations and start seeing which one’s quicker and that leads you to go to the next step and the next step.

I think what the challenges really are is working out what you actually are trying to achieve. Are you trying to achieve a hull which is best at accelerating in when it’s going from five knots to 15 knots of boat speed? Or is it a hull that’s best aerodynamically when you’re going 50 knots upwind or downwind? It’s just trying to weigh all of those aspects together.

Then on top of all that, there’s a whole lot of practical considerations. Where are the crew going to go? How do the crew want to work? Do they want to have everyone changing sides from one tack to the next? Or no one changing sides or three guys? How are the sails going to interact with the hull? Where’s our rudder going to go? How’s the steering system going to connect? Where are all the hydraulics going to go in the boat? It’s a really complex process.

The way we work, we have weekly meetings on a Friday morning where everyone involved in the design of the yacht, including a lot of the sailors, would come together. We’d basically start at the front of the boat and go back and look at each aspect and everyone contributes what they’d been working on in that area. Then we’d all try and combine that and spend the next week going through that iteration and by the next Friday, have a next generation. Over the course of the design, you’re going through 20, 30, 40 different designs. But at the end of that, there’s a deadline that’s fixed in stone.

We negotiate hard with the other half of our team, which is the builders. They say they need a year to build it and we say we need a year to design it and there’s only a year and a half in total. We ended up somewhere in between where we end up with nine months and they end up with nine months. But once that date is agreed, it’s absolutely cast in stone. We know that on whatever date it was, we had to deliver the absolute final hull shape. That’s the first thing that gets defined.

From that date on, there’s nothing we can do to the hull shape. You’re working more on the internal structure, the details of the deck and as you go on, you’re always just a week or so ahead of the builders so that you’re producing drawings just before they build the part.

We got a bit of relief through the lockdown in New Zealand. It was very tough on the builders because we’d pushed for as short a build time as we could and then suddenly they lost six weeks, which amazingly they managed to catch up, with increasing the team size and running night shifts. But that gave us as a design team a slight breather to catch up with the design elements and could work from home using our HP ZBook laptops. We were still running simulations and software analysis to evolve the yacht in the virtual world.

Can you talk a little bit about what cavitation is, the barriers that have been broken, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go?

Cavitation for yacht designers is like the sound barrier for aircraft, in a way. It’s a point where you get to a certain speed and you effectively hit this wall of drag. What’s happening is the water on the surface of the foils gets to such a low pressure that it effectively boils, so on the foils, you end up with these big pockets of steam and that is really draggy, it really slows the boat down.
You can design your foils to try and delay that happening, but you can’t avoid it. Sooner or later, you’re going to get to a speed where that happens. If you didn’t try anything, you might get to cavitation somewhere around 30 knots. If you try hard, you can push that back to maybe 45 knots, but really by the time you get to 50 knots, it’s unavoidable.

There are one or two boats that have gone faster than that, but they’re designed to operate exclusively in a post-ventilation regime, so they’ve effectively broken through the sound barrier. Whilst the sailing speed record is 65 knots, that was set by a boat that can only go in one direction and only works at really strong wind speeds.

In the America’s Cup, we have to be really competitive in a wide range of wind speeds, upwind and downwind and around the course. We’re not able to do something which is exclusively chasing the very top speeds.

Has the thinking changed around delaying cavitation to embracing it?

Over the last two campaigns, we’ve gained a much, much better understanding of it. When we started getting into foiling boats in 2011 onwards for the AC72 Catamarans in San Francisco, it was something which we discovered was an issue, but didn’t understand it very well and didn’t know how to design against it.

Now our full design process is very much treating cavitation from the start as one of the constraints. So whilst we can’t avoid it, we’re very much working with it and doing everything we can in our foil design to reduce the drag that it creates.

Could you have imagined when you were starting out that you would be in charge of a diverse team looking at all of these areas of science and the technology that you have?

I started my career originally as a structural engineer and then worked for McLaren Formula One. I’d never had that much interest in cars, but it was a great job and I was working with really cool people.

From that, I moved into yacht design. I actually moved into yacht design because I wanted to get a bit more into the artistic side of engineering. I’ve always been interested in architecture and in the beauty of yachts, so I naively moved into America’s Cup thinking maybe I could combine a little bit of the engineering and the more artistic side, but that hasn’t happened!

I love the technology and the engineering R&D. But no, when I first moved into America’s Cup, I never dreamed that I’d be leading the design team. I was just super excited to be part of an AC team.

Although it is now pretty much a full-time job managing the group of 35 I miss a lot of the actual hands-on engineering and optimisation. That’s really my passion, the technical side of it. I guess someone needs to manage the group, but I’d love to have more time to be hands-on with the tools.

How have you found that process for you to take on more of that leadership role and become slightly more hands-off?

I’ve found it quite challenging to be honest. I’m an engineer and I think for a lot of engineers, their first strength isn’t necessarily in management; they’re thinkers, they’re optimisers. But on the other hand, to manage that group, I think you do need to have a pretty good understanding of what the people in the team are doing. It probably wouldn’t work that well for someone who’s a great manager, but knows nothing about engineering, to come in.

I was discussing this with my boss at McLaren about 15 or 20 years ago, and he said to me, ‘As an engineer, you’re always impatient to get as much development done as you can, and you never have enough time in your life to do everything you want to do. There’s always new things you want to take on. So by managing a group, you can think of it as just expanding your ability to tackle more problems.’

I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that there’s a lot of challenges in management which I’ve tried to work hard on improving over the years. There’s a lot of aspects of it that I enjoy. I love the more strategic side of it, the bigger picture for the team, the politics between our team and the other teams and the legal side of working within the rules of the Cup, and being a part of defining those rules.

But I certainly miss the technical side. I find it quite hard to dip into that when 95% of my time is spent on the management. It’s difficult to really get stuck into a technical problem.

When you think about the talent that is working from here and the potential spread from that, for example with companies like Rocket Lab, do you get the sense that there’s going to be a little bit more of that as we go through, that we’re creating this incredible base?

Rocket Lab is a good friend of Team New Zealand. We’ve borrowed or stolen guys from them and vice versa. There’s a lot of parallels, both in the engineering design side, the simulation, the optimisation and in the manufacturing side of composites.

We’ve helped each other out and our Chief Structural Engineer at Team New Zealand was formerly the Chief Structural Engineer at Rocket Lab, who developed the rocket structure right up until the first launch. There’s a lot of crossover there.

Outside of that, foiling boats are really taking off everywhere. We get a lot of contact from sailing teams for sport or even super yachts and owners who are looking to make a real step with a performance cruiser. There’s a huge amount of interest in foils.

And then in the tools that we use as well. We’ve invested a huge amount in the software simulation tools that we’ve used over 10 years. If you look at our office now, there’s more people working on designing the tools than there are on designing the yacht, because ultimately, if you’ve got the best yacht design tools, you’ve got a pretty good chance of designing the best yacht.

Those tools are really applicable to any kind of yacht design, whether it’s a foiling monohull or a 17-foot cat or even a foiling wakeboard. We’ve also been getting a lot of interest from many sports organisations, sailing teams and naval architects about using those tools.

I think that the concept of using dynamic simulation in sailing has really spread throughout the yacht design world now and all America’s Cup teams are now using dynamic simulation. A lot of non-America’s Cup teams, the Vendée Globe sailing in France, as well as many of the other sailing series, are starting to get into that. That’s really been a big change in the industry.

Is there a potential in other industries for that spread as well?

I think there definitely is potential in other industries. Formula One is already very much into that. I think Formula One simulation is actually a lot easier than yacht simulation because you’re driving a car on a solid bit of track. The engine is always delivering exactly the same horsepower, depending on where your foot is on the throttle and the driver has really only got three inputs; the steering wheel angle, a throttle, and a brake.

Comparatively it’s pretty easy to model. The hardest thing in Formula One modelling is the tyres and how the grip between the tyre and the track changes with temperature, or at least that was the biggest challenge was when I was there; maybe there’s some new problems that I’m not aware of now.

With a yacht, sailing through waves which are constantly changing, you can never predict exactly what the surface of the water is and, even under the water surface, the waves are producing orbital velocities, so it’s not just a surface going up and down, there’s a huge current field happening beneath the surface.

Compared to an engine, your boat’s driven by sails, the sails are constantly changing shape. The shape depends on every gust, the gust comes along and it changes the shape itself and it’s something that you can’t measure. You can measure the wind speed at the bottom of the rig and at the top, but you’ve got no idea really of what’s happening in the middle. It’s a far more difficult thing to model accurately.

In terms of flow-on outside of the Cup, I think the tools we’ve developed are really good at doing fast iterations, trying design changes and getting the sailors in the yacht, sailing laps and looking at the effect on performance.

I think one area where that technology has yet to make so much of an impact is in aircraft design. I don’t think that Boeing or Airbus are likely to change the way they do things – they are so bound by regulation, but even some smaller aircraft developers, gliders, drones, typically have a very long development timescales. The rapidity of turnaround of simulation-led design and being able to make design iterations quickly probably could accelerate the early development phases of some aircraft.

From a public point of view, the race is quite contained over a period of time, but for you guys, it’s been a long period. At this point, are you exhausted? What are you going to do after the Cup? Are you going to take your yacht out?

Absolutely, I am. My boat’s been sitting in the marina. I’ve been getting very good value out of my marina fees for the last year with the boat staying put, so definitely planning to go sailing. I think we’re all a little bit tired, but at the same time, we’re kept going by the adrenaline of being out on the water and seeing the other boats racing and knowing that we’re so close to racing.
I was probably a bit more stressed in Bermuda. It was my first time as head of the design team and I felt a huge amount of pressure there in Bermuda to not make a complete embarrassment of ourselves. I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to do, but I didn’t want to come last.

The thing that kept me going in Bermuda was knowing that after June 2017, I’d get a decent amount of time off and I just kept pushing myself to that date. Then when it came, it never occurred to me that if you win the Cup, you don’t actually get any time off. We’re thinking about what’s happening with the rule, because all the other teams, the guys are effectively out of work. So you’ve got quite a responsibility to actually get something out there and keep the momentum going.

This time around, I’m still thinking about the time off I’m going to get in April. Hopefully it does really happen this time. Everyone’s keeping each other going, there’s a great team morale. The culture is brilliant. We’re such an internally supportive team and we’re all enjoying being here and coming to work every day.

What are some of the key things to a great culture from what you’ve seen?

I think the thing that’s made Team New Zealand really successful is being very open to ideas. The management in particular are very receptive to experimentation, trying things that might not work and not being conservative, being the opposite of conservative in knowing that we’re not going to win by just building a boat that’s okay. We’ve really got to push every single aspect.
So I’d put it down to having a team that from the top down is really supportive of trying stuff, experimentation and also having a really flat management structure. It doesn’t matter where those ideas come from, whether it’s the intern or the sailors or designers or the shore crew. There’s no restriction on where the ideas come from. If it’s a good idea, then we’re really keen to run with it.
The cycling in Bermuda was a good example of that. It’s not like we were the first team to ever think of cycling, but we were the first team that actually said, ‘Well, yeah, let’s really just try it. Let’s put some serious R&D into this and see if we can make it work.’ Rather than saying, ‘No one’s done it before,’ or ‘People have tried it and it hasn’t worked.’

We’re also really careful about who we hire. Everyone loves working here, loves working with the people they sit next to. There’s no one here with a huge ego or who’s trying to be protective about their ideas or their area. It’s just a really good collaboration. I think that comes from just having a really established culture.

When we need someone new in the team, it’s obviously important for us as a design team that we get the best designers, but also they’ve got to fit into the team really well. That’s as much a part of the selection process as the academic skills.

We will also, probably more than other teams, look to take more people from outside of the industry. Most of the people I’ve hired in this campaign, I can’t think of anyone that we’ve taken from another team. They’re all either new graduates or from another industry who are bringing new ideas. I think that’s really paid dividends.

One of the guys who was a big part of designing the shape of the hull had no experience in yacht design at all. He didn’t know how a yacht worked, but he had a PhD in aerodynamics and just came with some really fresh ideas. It’s about being open internally, but also in who we bring in.

Do you think that’s important for innovation, to bring in a different perspective?

Yeah, absolutely. I think actually making sailors an integral part of the design process contributes to that a lot. I think as a design team, we are a really, really cohesive team, but we have made a design process for ourselves, which is very efficient, very streamlined, but it’s possibly at a risk of just going down the same paths and optimising and optimising and optimising.

I think you do need something to throw in the genetic mutations, that shakes it up a bit. Maybe, 90% of those things turn out to be in the wrong direction, but you do need something just to give it a kick. Maybe one bad idea leads to a slightly less bad idea, which eventually leads into something which is gold.

Having sailors that are not engineers is important too, because they’ll come up with questions of why can’t we do this, or why don’t we do that? Which in a way you wouldn’t think of if you were purely thinking about the numbers. It gets you thinking, and then often that leads to an improvement.

As an innovator, where do you see the green shoots for opportunity in New Zealand?

I think New Zealand is really well-placed to just grow and grow in that area. With Team New Zealand, Rocket Lab and some other smaller tech industries, we’ve got a lot of development here. We’re a small country, but we’re starting to get noticed as a powerhouse in technology.

I think that Kiwi culture of experimentation, combined with practicality and enthusiasm to develop new things, is becoming a trademark. In terms of yachting and boat design, New Zealand already has an incredibly strong image, but I think in other areas as well, that’s really growing. It’s an exciting place to be working in the technology industry and it can only go up.