Through a friend’s copy of Presentation Zen, I stumbled onto the strange beauty of Pecha Kucha, a seemingly arbitrary but undeniably compelling approach to PowerPoint presentations.
Suggested and refined by architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein (and described here by Presentation Zen author Garr Reynolds), Pecha Kucha emerged as a way to share focused bursts of information in a fixed amount of time. Here are the rules:
- You get 20 slides in your PowerPoint deck
- each slide gets 20 seconds exactly
(no clicker involved, the slides advance automatically) - in six minutes and 40 seconds, you’re done.
The idea took off in Tokyo, and spread to Pecha Kucha nights all over the world — featuring designers, architects, artists, and other creative types. Now the practice is spreading to business, where six minutes and 40 seconds turns out to be plenty of time to convey a clarified idea.
Why add seemingly random constraints to a presentation format? Because wide-open boundaries of time and volume can lead to laziness and message sprawl. Artists throughout history have found ways of adding constraints to unconstrained expression to clarify their thinking and their work — through poetic or musical form, through norms and styles, through the limits of specific media. As I’ve said before, constraint is the essence of art.
Pecha Kucha may not be art (or it may be). But regardless, any premise that requires a bit more attention by the presenter and demands a bit less endurance by the audience is a step in the right direction. Could this be one of the ”little conference innovations” we’ve been looking for?
[ Thanks, John, for the discovery. ]
UPDATE OF 3/3/08: On a related note, a colleague just forwarded me this Boston Globe article on PowerPoint Karaoke, where presenters have to narrate a set of PowerPoint slides they’ve never seen before. Sounds like a blast! [ Thanks Jenn! ]
