We've had some great hospitality the past few days, but it was up until yesterday that I really felt like an impostor. It was a strange experience; it was when the debate actually drifted into considering the space that we're in here, and how the space was working as a sort of process of communication. I then began to feel that I could relate at last to what was happening, and then how we've seen the way the space was actually adapted for this afternoon (ed: the auditorium was transformed into a dancing stage), and how it was working up until yesterday.

And it's the sort of thing that we look at, 'cause that's our business. You know - this multi-purpose building that in fact has even had mobile phone boots built into it is extraordinary. We're really sort of communicators in a sort of didactic and experiential way. We're sort of story tellers but we predominantly work with stuff that actually may be hydraulic, where our interface may be rubber gloves in water, where we may use fire, air, our software may be kitchenware. Our models maybe UV plastic. Our icons may be icons. And even more confusingly, our real environments may become virtual environments.

This is one built for a CD-ROM. Just to go back, and to put some context against the Dome: 1851, the Celebration of Empire. Quite interesting actually, this is one of the first Audio-Visual galleries, I guess.

We move on to 1951. A Celebration of Surviving the War. I guess there's a correlation between the empire and war, possibly. We see the Dome of Discovery, which is a precursor of this piece, the Richard Rogers' extravaganza, that we're involved with where they've tried to bring a contaminated part of London in Greenwich to life, and it'll actually be more Expo than theme park. It will attempt to help people improve the way they may view their lives and the new Millenium. That's the kind of party line really.

It's about 350 metres wide and 50 metres high. It takes 12 Albert Halls - whatever that means. The interior plan consists of about 14 zones over the big show in the middle designed by Mark Fisher, a Rolling Stones set designer. So effectively, what we're trying to do with it is we're dealing really with a series of 14 zones that will encompass themes of mind, body, soul, work, rest and play, local, global and national. So the aspects of the environment is to do with the way we operate. How our body works has to do with how we work and how we relate to one another. All of these things that are clearly drawn together to try and give us a better view on how we live our lives in the future.

So, albeit that it's a kind of a day out, it'll be a day out where the visitor will try and be involved in a kind of face-to-face way. It's a live experience and it's something that hopefully will capture the imagination of the visitor. The serious play zone which we're invited to look at actually lead us to devise (in the way that I have heard over the last few days described) a series of descriptions of what we thought play really was about.

We started with these five, which took us a long time to develop and ended up using really three of them. Which was to do with play being about the essence of discovery, the essence of learning and the essence of challenge. And they became a kind of a guiding/operating principle for us.

In the scheme that you just saw, we started to look at the idea of building these kinetic billboards that you would actually pass through on these 'travel agents', moving up a series of kind of 'messages' on these walls. And so we started with this idea of using these message boards so that the architecture became a message system. And as we move through the system down to the back, you passed underneath and discovered that you actually interacted to build the messages. So it was a very interactive way of learning these key messages. As a kind of architectural device, it had a playful and interactive function - which was a good starting point for us. We wrestled with this for a long time - probably far too long - and we were clearly in the sort of territory of Saachi & Saachi - which is a sort of dangerous territory to be in.

The scheme moved on, and as an architectural solution, we kind of played around with something that enclosed this movement system. And in itself, it had a kind of playfulness, using air structures and this 'expression of energy' coming out of the air structures, using these helium balloons. So the message and the content were further away than the kind of architectural solution, which may well have been the wrong way around, but it was moving things on and we were giving something to the media as an expression of something exciting happening. The 'Bubblescape', as we called it, delivered you to the back and again, you dropped down inside. And effectively being inside you sent the messages up again. So the actual functionality of it hasn't changed much, but the architecture has.

And then (ed: we implemented) another architectural scheme that just tried to rationalise the actual engineering of it. But nothing much had changed; the inside was still left with this - try to understand how we're going to send the messages. You would actively send some sort of graphic message outwards or you would actually interact and send objects up into this kinetic billboard. Or even people enter a loop and move through the system.

There was a dramatic change in what we were doing and this became this 'magic box'. We moved away from this very expressive form of architecture and turned it on it's head. We said to ourselves: how can we rethink the criteria that are actually gonna make this thing work and stop spending money on the envelope and try to get a much more considered, complete piece?'

And what we actually developed was a very simple magic box, within which you would have a sense of irony in the fact that it had so little 'architectural presence' - although we may treat it optically in an interesting way. But what it would contain for us was something that we wanted to be experiential and not didactic. We didn't want a message, we wanted a quick experience. We'll be getting 3,500 people an hour passing through this space - which is pretty scary.

So those criteria were beginning to impact on how we approached the problem. We wanted full-on access to everybody. We've got an incredible profile of visitors: young and old - I mean it's everybody you can imagine. We wanted this to be quick and powerful. We wanted it to be innovative, and how were we gonna do this? We thought one way of doing it was possibly to try and introduce the digital world as a way-in, and look at how play has developed or may develop in the future. So we looked at work in galleries. We looked at the technical expertise from game play design, and wondered how we could make this an inclusive activity. Accessible and fun, involving. It involves people either to play or to watch. No one would be alienated. Video please.

So what we devised actually was something that consists of three components. There was a cueing system. There was a kind of a playground, a landscape. And there's an access sequence, which is a sixty-second travel-related ride. So the actual what we called the 'conveyer-escort', the cueing system, introduced you to the icons of play and then dropped you into a landscape which is quite surrealistic. It's a kind of cross between the Teletubbies and Salvador Dali. And we were gonna actually carve out the space and drop this whole series of game plays into it. And I'm just going to run through these images and visions that we've developed.

So there's activity to do with challenge, to do with sport, to do with physical experience. There's activity to do with playing to discover - that's physical. Playing to discover, where you jump around and actually form spaces and shapes in a kind of 'fog box'. All of these activities are presently under development. And we're working with artists and game play designers throughout the world in association with Geoffry Stocker, Ars Electronica, Vegas Inferno.

And then the more kind of self-expression game,s where we're actually inviting the participants to, say, work on the ceiling of the structure. So within this landscape we've got this ceiling that actually is an active surface that we can enable the participants to actually work on and interact with.

And hotspots, these are just little activities spread through that landscape.

So just a very brief introduction. But just to reprise: we are very excited about the opportunity to collaborate with artists and designers, to work essentially in a world that we're not party to. It's a world that as designers we don't seem to enjoy or to collaborate in in an effective way. And we would like to invite that collaboration to happen. That we design stuff and the artisan designers that we're working with design in a different medium, in a way. We just want to try and bring these two things together.

This is an open offer really of collaboration. If you have anything that you think may be able to be developed in such a piece, we invite you to talk to us now.

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