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The end of death by PowerPoint

Posted on 7 Dec 2007 at 16:52

Word of the nights quickly spread beyond Japan. "A guy from the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London saw it in Tokyo and said 'I'd like to take it back to London'," recalls Dytham. He did just that, and the ICA ran monthly shows from August 2005 right through to April of this year, including a show to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ICA, when celebrities, including newsreader Jon Snow, actress Joanna Lumley and comedian Johnny Vegas tried their hand. "Then it went to LA, then it went to Berne in Switzerland and off it crept around the world," adds Dytham. "Now it's in 100 cities. In the course of three years, it's gone viral."

Secret of success?

If you set up an ordinary slideshow event, you'd be lucky to fill a phonebox every month, let alone an auditorium that holds hundreds of people. So what makes Pecha Kucha so special? "We throw the presentation into Keynote [Apple's presentation software], and we fix the timings, so they [the presenters] have no control over it, they have to stand and talk to the slides," says Dytham. "It's really, really rigid. It's like design karaoke: you have no control, you just have to sing with the backing track. That adds to the whole drama of the event - it just keeps running."

Joe Ferry, head of design at Virgin Atlantic, admits to being a huge fan of Pecha Kucha, largely because the time pressure forces people to entertain. "It keeps you on your toes," says Ferry. "Creatives thrive on being under pressure, especially if part of the brief is time, because they're used to thinking that way."

Working within the constraints of Pecha Kucha also turns conventional presentation wisdom on its head, according to Ferry. "Presentation skills courses tell you to repeat things three times. With Pecha Kucha you don't have time to repeat things three times, but you can learn it - you have to for it to work," he says.

Some would argue that learning your lines and perfecting your timing makes Pecha Kucha sound like a stage show, but Dytham insists the best performers are those who can react to an audience. "We talk about this as a real social network - MySpace and Facebook are antisocial, you go home and talk to a girl or bloke on your screen. Pecha Kucha drags people out to a physical space to see a live event," he says. "When we're sent the images to put into a presentation they look really boring, we're worried it's going to be the worst Pecha Kucha night we've ever had. But when they're shown live in a space with an audience, the presenter's nervous, he's funny, she's good-looking... something happens and the slides become amazing."

Bringing it to businesses

Pecha Kucha might be a fun way for designers to showcase their work and impress potential employers, but can it work in a business environment? Can anyone really be expected to make executive decisions on the basis of 20 quick-fire slides? "Tell me a problem that can't be outlined in six minutes and I'll show you a problem it's probably not worth having a meeting about," says best-selling business author and confessed PowerPoint hater, Seth Godin, writing on his blog.

Dytham insists his invention is used seriously by businesses across the globe. "Autodesk, one of the biggest architectural software companies in the world, uses it internally for presentations from all its sales managers around the world," he claims. "When they come back to base and talk to the CEO about what's going on, they get six minutes 40 seconds to present. If you're in 120 countries, [ordinary] presentations can get pretty tedious."