Pecha Kucha Night

Last night I went to “Pecha Kucha” night, sponsored by AIGA, the professional association for design and I am left full of insights and ideas about the possibilities of this format. Here is a bit on “Pecha Kucha” from Wikipedia –

“The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up. Each event usually has 14 presenters. Presenters (and much of the audience) are usually from the design, architecture, photography, art and creative fields, but recently it has also stretched over to academia and the business world.”

So I’m left wondering, what if we could have a “Pecha Kucha” Night for social innovators, or one on “social technologies” ranging from online practices to group processes? What if IISC used “Pecha Kucha” formats for the learning labs that we design?

But what if we thought beyond a “Pecha Kucha” event and created tight, exciting “Pecha Kucha” presentation as a sort of framing question to set off a circle, dialogue or world café process? We could even bring this technique into the political realm, what if the Arroyo campaign collaboratively developed a presentation that became part of his stump speech?

More ideas come from here, this is a cool presentation format, how could they be combined with “youtube” or “podcasting?” Part of the obstacle to this is how long it takes to find the right images, or to rightsize the videos or podcasts for the limited attention span of our day. So I am wondering about what types of partnerships we could build. I suspect that there are enough creative people out there who could voluntarily help with the editing of such presentations.

How do we crowdsource part of this work? Are there partnerships we could be making with design and architecture schools and associations? Do we not have plenty opportunities for people to jump into and do a little bit of social change work? Would not the aggregate of many small contributions make for a number of very good things? Does this sound promising? Could we not problem solve together about ways to catalyze this sort of creative intervention? What ideas do you have?