hi! i'm manon i build things & write songs

For a century the piano lived inside twelve fixed notes per octave. Touch a key, hear a sound — nothing in between. The Seaboard tore that contract up. We replaced cold keys with a continuous silicone surface that listens to five separate dimensions of every finger, all the time.

It was the first commercial keyboard to fully implement MIDI Polyphonic Expression — the protocol that lets every voice be shaped independently. The hardware shipped from London. The software, sounds and gestural language shipped with it. The standard outlived the company.

MASCHINE was already huge when I joined. The challenge: make the flagship feel worthy of the name. We rebuilt the workflow around the artist's actual loop — grab a sound, build a pattern, arrange the scene, perform the song — and added high-res colour screens, RGB pads, and a tactile vocabulary that competing software lacked.

I led product management across hardware and software, with a focus on personalisation and data-driven feature decisions. The launch trailer crossed millions of plays in months.

MBUX SOUND DRIVE reads the car like an instrument. Throttle, brake, steering angle, recuperation — every dynamic event becomes a controlled musical parameter. Drive smoothly and the mix opens; corner hard and arpeggios fire across the stereo field.

I led the engineering of the adaptive remix system: deciding which musical layers respond to which driving signals, how transitions sound, and how stems blend. The system runs in real time inside MBUX, rolling out via OTA to second-generation MBUX cars worldwide.

The brief was simple — give kids five extra minutes of meaningful English practice every day, at home. Easy to say, much harder to design something a four-year-old actually wants to talk to.

We built Study Buddy as a safe, one-on-one English environment that lives on a kid's bedside table: songs, games, stories, and practice modes, all gathered in one friendly device. The result is kids speaking English sooner and more often, without it ever feeling like school.

Every minute of content was built to slot directly into EF's existing Small Stars course, so what kids do at home reinforces exactly what happens in class. The speaker doesn't replace the teacher — it extends them.

Fresh content lands on the device every month at no extra cost: new songs, games, and stories, plus practice modes that adapt as a child's vocabulary grows. The Study Buddy that arrives in May is not the same Study Buddy by Christmas.

The device went through seven full hardware revisions. Each one tightened something — the curve of the silicone, the weight in a kid's hand, the cost to manufacture, the way the LEDs read in low light. Before anything got drawn we sat with three- and six-year-olds and watched how they actually pick things up, talk to objects, and pay attention.

Sketches turned into rapid prototypes, prototypes into CAD, CAD into a real factory floor in Shenzhen. The whole thing was a constant negotiation between design intent and engineering limit — and the wins came from being honest about both.

Childproofing is the part of the project nobody talks about. Study Buddy is splash-resistant, drop-tolerant, and uses a monochromatic OLED so it never blasts blue light into a sleeping kid's bedroom. The outer sleeve is medical-grade silicone — soft enough to chew, durable enough to survive a tantrum.

The character on the front is Mel the owl, pulled from EF's Small Stars curriculum because she's gender-neutral and her squarish body happened to fit the speaker's form perfectly. The inner chassis was designed to swap characters as the Small Stars cast grows — Mel today, anyone tomorrow.

Kano started as "a computer anyone can build" — assemble a Raspberry Pi, plug it in, learn to code through visual blocks. Then Disney called. We launched the Harry Potter Wand coding kit (motion-controlled, casts spells), the Star Wars Force kit (gesture-controlled lightsabers), and Frozen 2.

I led core products through the period that put Kano second on Fast Company's most-innovative-consumer-electronics list, behind only Apple — ahead of Google and Microsoft. The kit appeared in an Apple keynote and shipped through worldwide retail.

The Paris 2024 Refugee Olympic Team carried the dreams of more than 100 million displaced people. The IOC asked Framestore to give those stories a film. I produced and composed the music — an original anthem with British rapper Che Lingo titled ALL IT TAKES.

Framestore wove generative AI imagery with live athlete footage. The film opened the Games and ran across IOC channels worldwide. It was nominated and recognised at Cannes Lions 2024 as a benchmark for purposeful creative AI work.

BBC R&D has spent a century deciding what broadcasting will be next. Colour TV. DAB. iPlayer. Future World Design is the team responsible for what comes after streaming — interactive radio for younger audiences, multiplayer virtual venues, design-fiction prototypes that road-test futures before we build them.

My remit covers AI, audience engagement, and the creator economy — translating research insight into shippable design and policy across the public service media landscape.