But first of all, for those of you who do not know New Metropolis and weren't there this morning, I'd better show you what it is. I cannot assume you all know the place and I can't assume you know exactly what it looks like. First slide please.

That's what we call New Metropolis. It's not supposed to be a ship. At least Renzo (ed: Renzo Piano, architect) has said he never thought of a ship when he designed it. Although on the day that the Queen opened it he said: 'I know everybody sees this as a ship. I never designed this as a ship, but welcome aboard.'

I won't go into the architecture that much. It actually sometimes looks much more magical. It can really look wonderful. In fact it is Europe's newest science and technology centre. It is profoundly, in it's starting points, both very new, very challenging and very old. It is the grandchild if you wish of the Museum van de Arbeid, which is the museum of labour founded by a Dutch painter in 1929. It then became in the '50's the NINT, a vocational-kind of museum. It then had a brief chrysalis-like moment as a hands-on science centre like the Exploratorium, and then it became this thing here. It is still profoundly an experiment. It is still profoundly a prototype. In fact the first director, Joost Dalma, called it a 'prototype for the 21st century'. It's an informal learning environment. Let me quickly show it to you and then I will tell you what we are learning from it, much of which we talked about this morning at New Metropolis, but also things we're learning about it that go further than even the discussion of play and learning.

I'll just go through these quickly. Inside the building you see all sorts of wonderful, magical things. The building is very open. It's five thematic zones in four floors. They have wonderful interactive games. They have interactive exhibits. We have all sorts of collaborative activities unlike any other science centre. I'll get back to that. We also have a working laboratory staff of real scientists. We believe that the fun of a science centre shouldn't be just sugar coated, it should be what actually is fundamental to the job. Video please.

All right, that's as much as you get. You can go see the place yourselves if you have time.

I want to talk about four ways in which we've learned about the New Metropolis project, or learned from the New Metropolis project. The first is as an institution of informal learning. About ten years ago the entire community was struck by the fact that in all science centres, as we know and sometimes love, people stay with exhibits for sometimes as little as 40 seconds. In fact the average is 40 seconds and fewer than half of the people complete the exhibit, whether it's to make something move or to make something happen. They press a button, they press another button and they bounce around. This became known in the business as the 'pinball effect'.

As an educational experience, one of the things we set our sights on at New Metropolis was is this 'something' that kids just do. Many people say 'oh yeah, kids just do that, you never gonna change that stuff'. We said hang on, we're not quite sure because we felt if that's all we could do, and you spend a 100 million dollars on a project and you get 500,000 visitors of which 200, 000 are kids, then you start to say that's an awful lot of money to spend on just bouncing around. So we said we have to actually become a critical profession and see if we can change that behaviour.

The first thing then was then to put the visitor back in driver's seat. Built an entire institution supporting the individual learner. Give them an environment in which they could do things in a certain way. But the proof of the pudding, the sign that we would actually be doing something that would go a step further, is people would stay longer. People might stay for a minute, we thought, two minutes - my God, what a success. Well in fact we find that people stay on the exhibits and the games at New Metropolis for up to ten times longer. The average visit time at New Metropolis now is four and a half hours. This is an unusual thing and I think we can say we have learned that our strategies, which involved games, involved play, involved putting the user at the centre of the activity, actually start to pay off. It's only been a year since we've opened. I'm not promising that this is the end, but we certainly seem to have made a difference. One thing that is remarkable when people go in, you don't see a pinball effect. In fact you see the opposite. You see people waiting patiently, getting a little pissed-off. They're waiting for someone to finish a game, finish an activity. This in fact is a reverse problem.

The second way I think that we're learning from New Metropolis is that when we conceived New Metropolis, it was conceived as a social project. It's a part of Amsterdam. Renzo Piano was selected as the architect because he believes in creating new piazzas. You all know the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He is someone who loves human activities in all their richness. So the New Metropolis building you saw on the last frame of that video, has a piazza, it has a roof. People use that roof independently. They come there to sit in the sun. They come there to Rollerblade - although we discourage this. They come there to watch fireworks. They go there on a beautiful day. We are seeing more and more use of the piazza.

And internally, inside the New Metropolis we also put an emphasis on collaborative play. In North America there's always been this design mythology of the sort of pinball machine. One exhibit; one user. It's got a front; there're some sides. But North Americans, particularly computer designers, are as much at fault as anyone in designing them as if there was a single user. Now we know not many people come as single users. They come in groups. They come with friends, family. They come with school classes. So we also took on this social mandate, this collaborative mandate. We created collaborative play environments. It has been a success. You see now an enormous amount of collaborative behaviour. You saw in that video too. There's never one person playing a computer game. It's always played by two or three or a family. People play together. This is an enormously important insight for designing new computer games and computer supports. Families play them together. People play them together.

The third thing we are learning is about the role of the science centre or the informal learning institution as a part of a national, political and social context. We're not really a science centre. We're not about science and technology. We're about growing up into a world where much of our lives are shaped by science and technology. But it's not about science and technology. For instance, on our fourth floor we have an installation art piece by Studio Azuro from Milan, an interactive carpet. We have Bill Viola's largest piece as part of the Stedelijk (ed: Amsterdam's modern art museum) retrospective. We're part of a world where science and technology, innovations in technology shape our lives. But they're not our lives. We're not there to show the stuff. We're there to show the world and let people be part of that world. That's why it's the New Metropolis. We're not victims. We're not slaves to our machines. An example of that is in the national debate in Holland last year about the future of the country(side). The ministry wanted to ask Holland what it should it become in 2030. Should it be more parkland? Should it build it's new cities along the transportation routes? Should it make a mix? They had a national debate and sent out books and ballots to everyone in the country. Over half of the votes cast about the future of the country were cast at New Metropolis using our interactive debate browser. And it attracted not only votes, which in itself is not necessarily interesting, but unlike a ballot which is with a tip of ink on it, where you don't know if the person has read anything or even thought about the issue, in the interactive debate browser that we used, you had to have looked at at least four competing positions before you could vote in the first place. So we know that people not only voted but examined the issue carefully. In January we're opening a whole Pavilion of Debates about the built infrastructure, the expansion of Schiphol, so social debate is essential.

The fourth thing I think we're learning is about the role of informal learning institutions. They used to be seen as gravy, as sugar sauce, as something that was nice to have around the school system. You know: send them to the museum for a day out. Teacher sits up and has a cup of coffee. The kids run around and break the exhibits. This is I think something we're learning: informal learning environments, be they science centres or museums, are an indispensable and irreplaceable feature on the educational landscape of a country and a continent. They provide three things that are very difficult to provide from the formal system or any other social instrument, any other institution. I called them the three R's. [ed:Informal learning] They provide Reach. They provide Relevance. And they provide Research. Reach is easiest. Informal learning institutions catch all sorts of people who, by definition, are not in school any more. They might be older, they might have dropped-out, they might be in marginalised communities. Informal learning centres like New Metropolis are open to everyone to come and enjoy, and come and explore and come and learn. They provide relevance by being very mobile, very fluid. We can change things extremely quickly. We update things. We have a team that is constantly looking for ways of staying in touch which what matters to people. New changes in society like the future of the country. We have a debate about defered parenthood. In Holland, people have babies later than anywhere else in the world. Their first child is born to mothers of average age 29.

So we're able to keep up with things that are happening. But fundamentally what is often ignored, to me I always call it the iceberg - the public side is the tip of the iceberg - is research. You can only learn about learning in an environment where people come out of their own choice. You can't learn about unforced learning in a classroom. In a classroom you can see how people learn, you can see things getting better. You can do all sorts of research. But they're in a classroom. You don't know if they want to be there or they want to just get a good mark or they want to get out of the classroom They not only come to New Metropolis, in an informal sense, they pay a lot of money to do so. In fact, they come and they pay and they get in and they come again and they come again and they come again. So it is an ideal laboratory. What we're learning about the importance of this kind of institution is that they are laboratories, and that they play a part in the research community world-wide.

I think one of the important things about this conference that makes sense out of an institution like New Metropolis, is that we're not alone. We're not just one little blip. We're connected to an international community of learners, a community of researchers, and that is the greatest strength and why this country and in fact this new federal Europe that we seem to be creeping towards, needs institutions like this as engines of research, not only as places that can help our children and the rest of society meet the challenges of the next century.

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