Got pecha-kucha?
PowerPoint is like the weather or Dancing With the Stars: Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything. Enter Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two European ex-pat architects in Tokyo, who’ve come up with an elegant hack. Use 20 slides. No more, no less. Each slide must be on the screen for exactly 20 seconds. (The presenter doesn’t control the slide advancer.)
I write about their innovation in a short article in the new issue of Wired. And on Wired.com, as well as below, you can see my own (halting and inelegant) first stab at a presentation in this form. Man, was this tricky. Notice how quickly my words fall behind my images.
I learned about pecha-kucha in Japan — and I’ve now got a sneaking suspicion that’s going to get popular on this side of the Pacific. Seth Godin, that one-man early warning system for all things innovative, has picked up on it. So has the learning world’s uber-guru, Elliott Masie. Tom Masters even imagines pecha-kucha book reviews.
Check it out. But you’ll have to read the story to find out what the heck “pecha-kucha” means.