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The end of death by PowerPoint

Posted on 7 Dec 2007 at 16:52

It's fast, it's fun and it won't leave you wishing you were down the pub. Barry Collins discovers Pecha Kucha.

The average visitor to a website will stay for just 30 seconds; television viewers watch a single channel for an average of only 11 minutes before getting an itchy index finger and flicking over; adults can concentrate on a single topic for a mere 20 minutes before their mind starts to wander. In a world where we're bombarded by more information than ever before, attention spans are shrinking faster than the polar ice caps.

So how long do you think you could keep your focus on a PowerPoint presentation? Ten minutes? Twenty? Half-an-hour? Last year, the chairman of a well-known mobile phone company held a press conference in Germany and, just before he started, the thumbnails of his slideshow accidentally popped up onscreen. The journalists in the room all craned forward to take a look, but they weren't scanning for titbits of information; they wanted to know how much of this they'd have to sit through: "slide 1 of 65" the counter at the bottom of the screen revealed. The groans could be heard back in London (without the assistance of a mobile phone).

The good news for the world's technology journalists - and anyone else who's ever had their will to live slain by Death By PowerPoint - is that there's a new style of presentation that's sweeping the world. A rigidly disciplined slideshow in which each presenter is limited to exactly 20 slides and given only 20 seconds to talk about each before the plug is pulled and it's time to move on. Six minutes, 40 seconds to present anything from the photographs of your gap year in Borneo to the 2007 sales figures from the French subsidiary. It's called Pecha Kucha and it's coming to a business near you.

Born in Japan

Pecha Kucha was the brainchild of architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. The pair work in Japan - a country that appears to be in a perpetual hurry, with hotel pods you book by the hour and sushi bars that deliver lunch in seconds. Thus, the pair was looking for a way to cram more presenters into their popular "show-and-tell" events for fellow designers, which had recently relocated to a spacious new studio.

"We always had these show-and-tell events in our office every couple of months," Dytham told PC Pro. "I'm sure everyone has those in a design office - you've been somewhere interesting, have some cheese and wine on a Friday, and show some slides. So we thought why don't we try to take that to a large audience and invite other people that have been to other great places, or they're designing an interesting architectural project and they want to show-and-tell their slides with other people?"

However, it swiftly dawned on Dytham that inviting several speakers on the same night was a recipe for boredom. "We had the realisation that architects like me talk too much and they go on and on and on about a boring detail that nobody has any interest in at all," he says. "We quite quickly came up with the idea that they should have a fixed number of slides, and we should set them on a timer so they couldn't talk for too long about each slide. And so this notion of 20/20 came up quite by chance. And that allowed 10-15 people to present: six minutes 40 seconds each, or about an hour-and-a-half for the whole set of presentations."

Fast and furious

So Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat) was born, and it quickly became a hit among the Tokyo design crowd who flocked in their hundreds to see their contemporaries attempt to keep pace with their slideshow. "We got about 100 people at the first event and they seemed to be keen for the next one, so we started running it on a monthly basis," says Dytham. "We're now on our 46th month in Tokyo. We get 300-400 people a month coming to an event now - we're only restricted by space."