 How can we connect global challenges with creative thinking? And how can we make landscapes which actually connect people more and more? So I want to show you two or three examples of what happens when technology jumps out of the computer screen and becomes a part of the things that we wear, the landscapes we inhabit. And as mentioned before, I'm from the Netherlands, which is a very specific country because most of the land is actually below sea level. And that's quite fascinating because the Dutch people, they seem very normal, very straightforward. Right is right and curve is curved. But if I tell my friends abroad that I think 60 or 70% is below sea level, they're like, are you insane? Do you know how dangerous that is? But because of these very refined systems of pipes and canals and councils, we somehow managed for the last 5,000 years to keep us dry. But sometimes it goes wrong. So here you see the breach of the dike in Amsterdam. Thousands of people died. You see the Dutch water council here in some kind of despair trying to save something. Millions of guilders of damage. So although our country is living below the sea level, innovation, technology and creative thinking is within the DNA of the country we inhabit. But sometimes we forget. And so in a way the Dutch government came to me and said, can you make something to create water awareness? Because now people just take it for granted and therefore the risk that something bad happens goes up. And we created Waterlicht, which you see here at Museum Square. A combination of LEDs and lenses showing how high the water level would be if we stop. If we all go home, do not invest in new ideas. Do not care about good governance. Do not care in a sort of collective effort. And this was something which we experienced every night there. A short movie. Quite spooky. Spacey. What I feel about it is a bit underwater. That you're under a lake. Yes, quite beautiful I think. With the waves above us. And it's magnificent. Of course I know that we're below sea level. But as you say, it would not be so nice if I suddenly took this over. So we dropped this on a public square. One of the largest public squares in Amsterdam, the Museum Square. We were lucky to be honest because usually it takes like two years to get a license, a permit. But there was sort of a gap for a couple of days. So there was no big advertising campaign. We sort of dropped it there. And people came, of course. It was a public space. We were mesmerized. First night, a couple of thousand visitors. Not so many. Started to share it on social media. And the third night, 60,000 people started to show up. And it was, I think, during the night we realized we had a permit until 5,000 people. So with some calls had to be made. What was beautiful when we were walking through the audience, that people were actually talking about the power of water. Some have experienced the floods in the Netherlands and were scared. And wanted to go away, wanted to go home. And others were mesmerized. Can we harvest energy from the change in tides? Can we make floating cities? So for one little moment, a collective experience was created where people imagined about the future instead of just in the now. And I think that's sort of the power of these kind of temporary or permanent installations of art. The notion of calling yourself an artist is that you're some kind of autistic guy, Van Gogh guy, sitting on an attic, cutting off little pieces of your ear, being lonely and feeling disconnected. Well, I have news for you, this is not true. Actually, Van Gogh was not the most happy person in the world, but he would travel, he enjoyed. So all of these kind of things are, of course, made with teams of experts, scientists, designers, engineers. So this is our dream factory in Rotterdam, an old glass house which we saved from demolishment in order to realize the prototype. So you have the process managers here, you have the architect and the designers here, and here a lot of prototypes are made to experiment, to learn, to fail, to update, to hack, to make proposals, how we want the future landscapes to look like. And what I think important is to realize that this is not just sort of art or a nice or a hobby or something to talk nicely about at a wedding or at a birthday. No, no, no, no, no. This is the new economy. This is a report I really personally like of World Economic Forum where they interviewed a lot of smart people all around the world and they asked them what are the top ten skills necessary to be successful or to be happy or to be future-proof. And this is not being really good in C++ or Excel, and it's not just about craftsmanship. No, look at this. Number three, creativity. Number two, critical thinking and number one, problem-solving. Being able to make connections, something robots or computers are really not really good at these days. So I think that's very interesting, that the role of art and creativity becomes more and more important in a world which becomes digitalized, that these human skills in which we make connections, in which we can dream, in which we have empathy, can be, I think, skills that are more valued as we grow more and more technology. And at the same time, technology hurts us. Technology somehow literally kills us. This is two years ago, in Beijing, looking from my room on the 32nd floor, I mean, I love China and I learned so much from it. And at the same time, our desire for progress, our desire for innovation, sometimes has side effects that you and I never imagined. And here you see me looking from my room on Saturday, it was. And I can see the world around me, the cars, the people, the trees, life is okay. It's sort of good. And this is on a Wednesday and a Thursday when the whole city was completely covered with smoke. A city so polluted, you almost start to smoke again just to feel healthy. And of course, it's easy to look at Beijing, but every city has problems with this. Paris, London, my own city, India. Can we change this? In a weird way, I became inspired by Beijing smoke. This is where it started. And yes, there is a very active government having its war on smoke, investing billions in clean technology, pro-bicycles, electrical cars, et cetera, et cetera. But it takes quite long. And I want to operate within the now. So basically we start with a very simple principle. When you have a plastic balloon, when you were a boy or a girl, and you polish it with your hands, it becomes static, static electrified. And I remember when I was in these very boring children parties, when I was eight years old, I was always amazed by that. It's pure science, a gift from planet Earth. What if we would use that principle to literally build the largest smoke vacuum cleaner in the world, which sucks up polluted air, cleans it on the nano level, and then spits out the clean air, creating parks or playgrounds which are clean. Teaming up with experts after two years of people telling me it can never be done, it already exists, we built the first one, sucking up 30,000 cubic meter per hour, cleaning it on the nano level, the ultra fine PM2.5, PM10 particles, and using no more electricity than a water boiler, like 11, 1400 watts. And this was the first pilot in Rotterdam. It's really weird that we accept it as something normal and take it for granted. I wanted to create a place where citizens, makers, NGOs and governments can experience clean air. A bubble of clean air, where people can think, meet and work together how to make a whole city smoke-free. It's a place created by the largest air purifying in the world which can travel a smoke-free tower. In the future, waste should not exist. By putting the captured smoke particles on the high pressure, we create smoke-free rings. And so by sharing a smoke-free ring, you donate a thousand cubic meter of clean air to the city where the smoke-free tower is. And so launched by the mayor of Rotterdam 14 months ago, we created in a way a place where people can smell the difference, where people can feel the difference, and no one tower can, of course, not completely clean a whole city. Let's be honest about that. But I think if you make a place where people can feel the difference, that's a way how to engage them and by sort of this bottom-up approaches, is a great way to update and to upgrade a place. But what is also interesting is this is the stuff... I think I have it... Oh, yeah, here. Oh, this is Rotterdam smoke. So this is the... I'll show it to you around. This is the stuff we were sucking up from the skies. And this is like really... This is costing two years of our lives. Yes, please, you can show it around. So children cannot play outside anymore, quality of life goes down. This is in your lungs. So when you live next to the highway, it's like 17 cigarettes per day without the pleasure of the nicotine. At the same time, we believe waste should not exist. Waste for the one should be food for the other. Think as a circle, a network in a way. And so we realize that what is it? 42, 48% of this stuff is carbon, of the coil factories. And carbon under pressure, me being the son of a math teacher, realized, carbon under pressure, you get diamonds, yes. So that was an inspiration, in a way, to make smoke-free rings. So we compressed it for 30 minutes. And so by sharing a ring, you donate 1,000 cubic meters of clean air to the city where the tower is in. And this was interesting because while we were developing this smoke-free tower, we had a problem. We had a budget problem, in a way, because a lot of mayors were interested in it, but at the same time, a bit hesitant. Like, does it work? Doesn't it sort of over-emphasize the fact that we are polluted? So they were in this, that's with innovation, they were sort of in this state of idleness. And we launched a Kickstarter campaign, a crowdfunding campaign, with this kind of smoke-free jewelry. And over 16,000 people started to pre-order this. So wedding couples who wanted to get married and give each other clean air instead of the diamonds, the brand diamonds, students, you know, mayors all around the world. But what was interesting, they didn't only pre-order it, but they also prepaid it. So the finance we made with the jewelry helped us to build the first smoke-free tower. So I think that's very important if you want to upgrade reality. It's about technology, it's about facts, it's about measurements, but it's also about making something shareable, which you can show to the one you care about. After 14 months of collaborating with Beijing government, we now, and this will be launched in the coming weeks, have signed an agreement with MIP, the Ministry of Environmental Protection Bureau in Beijing, the capital, to do several smoke-free parks. So we're launching the first smoke-free park in September, downtown Beijing, and after it we'll travel to different cities in China. It's very, very exciting to provide the dream of clean air for everyone and to engage people to become part of the solution instead of just being part of the problem. All these kind of projects in a way start with a dream, a radical idea infused by technology, infused with sometimes naivety or a lot of knowledge or a combination of these things. We call that in the studio Maya, most advanced yet acceptable. Try to find the edge of what is and what is not possible. But history is important as well. This is Kinderdijk, one of the most famous places in the Netherlands, where you see the old windmills made in, what is it, 1740? And I think now it's a place of culture. Wedding people go there to have their photos taken, a lot of tourists, et cetera, et cetera. It's a cherished place that people love. At the same time, I can imagine that if this was dropped 300 years ago in your backyard, you would have been like, this is like from Mars, look at this shape, it's like alien. And at the same time it's cherished now a lot. Can we sort of bring this mentality to the windmills of today? Green energy, everybody wants it, but not in our backyard. So we wanted to sort of bring this prestige, this glamour of the old windmills into the now. We made windlicht. This is one of the final projects we did a couple of weeks ago. Short movie. So here we almost did nothing. Seriously, I mean the windmill was invented already and LED was I think invented in 1962 or 64. But all we did is find a missing link between what is there and what is there to become between something which is very poetic and at the same time which is very practical. And it was great to sort of walk around having thousands of people coming to that location and just being sort of looking at the wind at the nature, at the light, like a dance like a choreography, like a sort of zen type of being. And walking around I realized that maybe more and more this is what we should be doing to realize that in a way everything already exists in terms of technology, in terms of idea in terms of ambition. So all we really can do is find the new connection the new link between the dream and the business plan between the poetry and the fact sheet so to speak between the idea and the realization and I think if we're willing to make more and more connections which go beyond the sectors or the silos we live in there is a whole new world to be explored and I'm looking forward to explore that a bit more.