08.04.08
Chit-chat, Tokyo style

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I’ve lost count of the times I’ve eagerly awaited a lecture or conference only to be disappointed by the speakers. For people used to expressing themselves visually, designers seem to have a kind of inbuilt stumbling block when it comes to verbalising about their work.

In fact hang around at the end of most design lectures and you’ll repeatedly hear a damning phrase - ‘yeah, but the work was great wasn’t it?’ We’ve all got used to the fact that designers can’t talk and now manage our expectations accordingly. Not everyone can be Spiekermann or Sagmeister (both truly excellent speakers) but even the greatest designers in the world can turn the most committed acolyte comatose if monotonous delivery, comfy seats and over-zealous central heating combine to the wrong effect.

I’m sure this is one of the reasons why the Pecha Kucha (??????) phenomenon, now 5 years old, has been so successful. By limiting the speakers to short presentations, if someone’s useless, the work is dreadful, you don’t agree with what they’re saying or you hate their tie, you only have to endure five more minutes and they’re off. Not fifty-five minutes and the continual fear of snoring loudly as they load their third carousel of slides.

The mathematics of Pecha Kucha (originating from the Japanese for the sound of conversation - ‘chit-chat’) are dead easy – 20 slides per speaker, 20 seconds per slide, ideally starting at precisely 20.20 in the evening. Oddly, the recommended amount of speakers is 14 (what happened to the 20:20:20 rule there?), but essentially a gloriously simple idea.

In fact it’s so simple that Pecha Kucha’s originators, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein of Klein Dytham architects, have given birth to a monster that has rampaged across the globe – at the last count PK nights are planned or have taken place in 118 countries around the world. This has forced Dytham to face up to registering the name and the idea whilst fighting off several parties (especially in the UK) who can see big bucks in the idea and have tried to steal it, or register it, often without even asking.

Preparing to do a PK is a surreal experience. Choosing 20 slides is no problem but the monotonous regularity of the 20 second interval is the killer. In my particular case, I’m not one of those speakers who will talk at a regular pace over images - I might talk for 30 seconds over one, 130 over another, 3 over another. So forcing yourself into a timed straightjacket is tough.

Then you have to consider your audience – when I’ve done a PK in the UK it’s been to an arty, ‘in the know’ audience sitting down at the ICA, but a week or so ago it fell to me to ‘perform’ at the 50th ever Tokyo Pecha Kucha (or peh-chak-cha, to give it its Tokyo nickname) at it’s birthplace, a converted concrete taxi garage under Roppongi called SuperDeluxe.

It’s a long rectangular space with a seating side and a drinking side. The speakers, whilst they benefit from 3 simultaneous digital projectors beaming all along one wall, immediately have to battle with the inexorable draw of the analogue chit-chat at the bar. Especially if you’re dull or a bit off your game.

We missed a few of the early speakers but arrived soon enough to catch some truly remarkable designs and animations by Hiro Sugiyama. The work of the Chinese/Japanese architectural group Mad Architects stood out as truly astonishing, although it’s not clear how much of is actually built yet (but that doesn’t seem to matter too much any more).

Film lecturer Noam Toran from the Royal College of Art delivered what I thought was a really neat selection of clips and stills from horror films and suchlike but neglected to tell anyone at the start WHY he was doing this (and that he was in fact a film lecturer) so left the audience a little bemused. It reminded me a little of that great presentation advice to always tell your audience at the beginning what they are about to be told, tell them again as you go through and tell them again at the end.

At the end of the first half, Japanese light-painters Tochka charmed the audience with examples of their time-lapse work and then proceeded to indulge in a bit of half-time-beer-break ‘instant workshopping’ with the crowd as they all waved their mobile phones, lighters, pigtails, whatever in the air. I’m not doing it justice – follow the link, it’s great.

Current D&AD President Simon Waterfall dealt admirably with the last slot of the night as he delivered his sake-fuelled digital manifesto but for truly attention grabbing chutzpah the fantastically named Teddy Cookswell delivered a perfectly themed talk about Tom Cruise, gorillas, colour, sperm and sex (or something like that) in both Japanese and English to a truly Jinglish crowd that combined all the elements of performance, stand-up, theatre and entertainment to a perfect level. Brush up on your Japanese with a YouTube version here. Blimey. Follow that.

By the time I came on, at past 10.30 with the audience clearly split between the sitters and the drinkers, my carefully crafted set of slides were just a bit too, well, nice. That which worked well in daylight and even included the odd (and diligently learned) bit of Japanese vocab seemed a bit out of place at night in a drunken Aoyama basement. Thank goodness I only had to endure six and a half minutes. I learned later that Dytham, as he out-troduced me, said I was good at oyajigyagu which translates roughly as someone who tells ‘dad jokes’. Mmm, thanks Mark.

There’s a famous adage about there being a great talk inside every creative person, called ‘my work’. But as I read the nice little book about Pecha Kucha that has been produced to commemorate the 50th, it suggests that a good PK talk often veers miles away from ‘my work’, and is far better because of it. It’s good advice. Save your life story for the alumni presentation at your old college – Pecha Kucha is 6 minutes and 40 seconds of pure entertainment, ideally on one topic, the weirder the better.

Sounds simple really, doesn’t it? Sadly, it isn’t.

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Above, Mark Dytham, Michael Johnson and Astrid Klein

Michael Johnson was speaking at the 50th Tokyo Pecha Kucha along with Jon Yong Fook Cockle (true), Shinobu Machida, Onkar Kular, NAYA architects, Uleshka Asher, Hiro Sugiyama, Kazue Monno + Takeshi Nagata from Tochka, Teddy Cookswell, UltraSuperNew, Noam Toran, Silas Hickey, Yosuke Hayano from MAD, Simon Waterfall and Klein Dytham architecture.

The next London Pecha Kucha is digitally themed, hosted by D&AD and takes place at the Logan Hall on the 17th of April. Better book quick.

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