Off Course-On Target

Fast, Fresh, and Furious: “Pecha Kucha”...the New Karaoke?

WOW!  Did I ever have a fun evening last night with my first ever Pecha Kucha Night experience. Pecha Kucha, pronounced “peh-chak-cha”  or “pet-shah coot-shah” depending on who you talk to, is a relatively new presentation format that is seeing quite an underground surge of interest. It’s happening in over 50 major cities around the world. Heck, even Tasmania has one now! My company, Autodesk Inc., set up this event at our annual worldwide sales conference for all our thousands of resellers. It’s taking place in Las Vegas, so perhaps that part makes sense. Thanks to Maurice Conti (who came up with the idea) and his talented staff of helpers, it was a huge success. Here was a packed room full of several hundred curious sales people wondering just what this thing that they couldn’t pronounce was all about.

So what is it? As I mentioned earlier, it’s simply an interesting format for “presentations” but it would be better characterized by the Japanese term Pecha Kucha, which it is derived from and reflects the sound of casual conversation ("chit-chat").

As a Pecha Kucha presenter, you come up with 20 different images (photos usually), put them in an order you decide upon, and provide these to the organizers who then put them into a sequenced roll or “slide show”. They set this up with an automated timer to change to the next image every 20 seconds. The timing is automatic and the speaker has NO control over timing of the slide change. As a Pecha Kucha presenter you take the stage, tell the projectionist to “hit it” and you’re off.  Six minutes and 40 seconds later, you’re done! Time for the next person.

Pecha Kucha Nights were started in 2003 by two architects living in Japan: Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham od Klein Dytham Architecture as a venue for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. They were looking for a way to get people who are typically shy or at least busy working behind computer screens or in studios out in public to tell their stories and join in the conversation.  As Moma put it in his Wired article about his Pecha Kucha experience in Wired magazine “The solution: Give them a format, a structure, a parlor game, a chance to talk about their current interests and listen to others doing the same.”

As a forum for designers, it was perfect for myself and for Autodesk since we are both very focused on design. Last night I was honored to be invited to join seven other creative thinkers with VERY different backgrounds.

The roster included:

Carl Bass – CEO of Autodesk Inc.
Ken Bado – Senior VP of WW Sales & Marketing, Autodesk
Bruce Beasley – Internationally renowned sculptor
David Montesino – Visual Journalist, art director and 3-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Johnathan Pickus – Manager, Las Vegas Valley Water District
Sylvain Plourde –  Co-founder of graphics company 3Vis in Montreal Canada
JT Tomlinson –  Head of Automation, Cirque du Soleil

Now THAT is diversity…not only from their job titles and organizations but even more so by the Pecha Kucha “conversations” they provided!

And what did they Pecha Kucha about? Couldn’t really do it justice with just words, but what was common about each of these otherwise wildly different presentations was that each of us talked about a mixture of things we care about and what makes us who we are. So it was a wonderful blend of personal interests and projects and professional pursuits. The commonality that came through loud and clear to me was passion—connections to family, personal interests such as some amazing fine woodwork projects, pursuit of meaning, life and work experiences and an overall exploration of what motivates us.  It was truly an example of “experiential learning” and you really had to be there to understand it and to appreciate one or more of the apparently tasty PechaKutinis that were being served to one and all!
(The sessions may have been videotaped so I am working on being able to upload some for you to look at and I’ll post them here if I’m able to locate them.)

What did I learn and enjoy from the experience that you might find of value and interest? As per the title of this posting,  it was wonderfully and frighteningly fast, fresh, and furious. The tight and simple 20 image/20 second format flipped the tired lecture, PowerPoint presentation on its head and stimulated diversity, connectivity, and cross-discipline conversation and collaboration not only in the presentations themselves, but in the great conversations in between and afterwards. People I’ve run into here since then are still buzzing and talking about it.

I also appreciated how this standard format acted as a great equalizer of presenters and every one of their images since they each got exactly the same time up on the screen. Is this the new way to do all presentations? Absolutely NOT!  As I’ve said many times here at Off Course – On Target, a truly new innovation rarely eliminates or replaces what went before. Instead, it adds to our choices for powerful ways to capture, express and share ideas. I’d recommend it highly for your consideration if you are organizing or participating in events where you or others are trying to share ideas with others. Or you may just want to experience a Pecha K

Music, Metadata and the "Onomies"

Regular readers and listeners know that I see metadata as an integral component of the future visions for learning, performance, and probably most other things. They also know that I worry that we often suffer from a version of that old story/joke about the man looking for his lost car keys:

You are out for a walk one night and happen upon this poor fellow who is down on his hands and knees on the sidewalk frantically searching for his car keys. You stop to lend a hand. After you'€™ve searched for several minutes without finding them, you ask him to recall where he last had them and he says he thinks he dropped them as he was locking his car. To which you say, "So this is your car here?" and he says, "  No, my car is down two blocks and around the corner."  Puzzled, you ask, "Why are you looking here then?" and he says ..........................................."  Oh, because this is where the light is better!"

Sounds silly, but I wonder how easily and often we mimic this behavior of "looking where the light is better"? Seems to me that we often look in the wrong places for the wrong things, or don't shine a light in the right places. Specifically, I find that we often overlook some extremely valuable ideas, technologies, and solutions simply because they are not developed or applied for our specific domain or interests.

For example, the world of music is one of my favorite and richest sources of innovative examples of personalization. It absolutely reverberates with a plethora of great lessons. I'€™ll try to cover more in future postings, but today I want to bring to your attention to a recent blog posting from my Belgian buddy Erik Duval called "From folksonomies to taxonomies".

Erik and I are mutually fascinated by music in general and the lessons it has for us. Erik references a recent posting in Duke Listens! , a blog by Paul Lamere, which has some very good examples of using the automated metadata generated by Last.fm.  Although I have some concerns with his specific example (which involves the use of music genres, such as blues, rock, heavy metal), he uses it to make some excellent points about how you can take the metadata (tags), usually referred to as "folksonomies" or "metadata for the masses",  generated by something such as Last.fm and use these to generate taxonomies.

Duke Listens! is also a fun site for several other topics that I find particularly interesting including some of the amazing things that the middle school kids that Duke coaches build with Lego blocks, and his writings on speech recognition, tagging and music.

I'll cover some additional lessons from the world of music in subsequent postings. Meanwhile, check out these examples of automated generation of metadata and taxonomies. I think you will quickly imagine ways you can apply this technology to your domain. When you do, please share these ideas here so we can all benefit from your insights, and hopefully trigger even more.

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