Pecha Kucha - presentations in under 7 minutes

For the past six years, people around the world have been gathering to share PowerPoint presentations for fun. Yes, you read that right … PowerPoint.

In 2003, two designers developed a presentation technique called Pecha Kucha, (pe-CHAK-cha, Japanese for “chit-chat”) where one may present only 20 slides, with 20 seconds to talk about each. The idea has spread quickly, and the simple rules allow for creative twists. Its evolution into performance art has reached the point where “Pecha Kucha Night” is probably a lot of  fun!

Pecha Kucha has been successfully used in a number of college courses, although I see no evidence of its having been tried at Notre Dame. It sounds like a useful strategy for avoiding “Death by PowerPoint.”Anyone care to give it a try? How about a Pecha Kucha night at Notre Dame?

To learn more: Our friends at ProfHacker posted a good article on this recently,  “Challenging the Presentation Paradigm“. There was also a good article in Wired magazine a couple years ago, and it was even written up in Time magazine. The definitive authority appears to be pecha-kucha.org.