Pecha-Kucha Night Phoenix

Last night, Saori, some of our friends, and I went to the first official Phoenix Pecha-Kucha night. I say unofficial, because Saori and I both attended the GreenBuild Pecha-Kucha night that was hosted by the Young Green Builders association, but that was a national event rather than a local, so it doesn't really count.

For the uninitiated, Pecha-Kucha is a series of presentations in an informal setting. The format is very rigidly defined. Each presenter has 20 slides which are shown for 20 seconds each. That's it. The topic and contents vary wildly from presentation to presentation, but its historically and typically related to design. This way, it forces designers who tend to be either very expansive or circuitous in describing their work to limit themselves to explaining their projects in a very concise and clear way. It originated in Japan in early 2000's as two Europeans hosted the first Pecha-Kucha night in a Tokyo nightclub.

Anyway, the event was hosted at the Irish cultural center in downtown (which was odd, since I actually once danced the Ceilidh in the same building). It was $8, but the ticket included a free beer, and about 150 people showed up. The presentations varied a lot. There was one on creation of fonts, one presented by Nan Ellin about Canalscape and Phoenix, decorating with 50s memorabilia, sustainable architecture, and even one about focus group testing. There was a very nervous ASU grad student from Taiwan who presented her work on interfaces. This tiny girl hacked the Wii hardware to make her own interface tools and then designed software to interpret it in different ways. Then she also had this screensaver which would generate bubbles showing what program/websites she had been browsing by use, such that if you're spending a lot of time on facebook, when you return to your computer, there's a huge facebook bubble reminding you of how much time you're wasting.

Anyway, it was pretty interestng and at the end, they gave every single person there a copy of PHX 21st Century City, which usually retails for about $50. The next pecha-kucha is in July, so mark your calenders!