Style Watch: Rattan Revolution
Diversions: All Talk
Food: Season to Taste
Outdoors: Comfy Camping
If your working day involves listening to or making presentations, then the last thing you’ll want to do after hours is sit and look at more slides on a screenunless you happen to be attending a Pecha Kucha Night, that is. Named after the onomatopoeic Japanese phrase for the sound of talking, Pecha Kucha Nights are spreading like wildfire through the creative professions, based on a highly entertaining premise: invite a group of leading designers to talk about their current work, using only 20 slides, with each slide on screen for just 20 seconds. Top names, the quickfire pace and, it must be said, plenty of alcohol make Pecha Kucha events a must for anyone interested in their local style scene. “You’ve really got to be there to get the atmosphere,” says co-founder Mark Dytham, who describes the intimacy of these gatherings as “like the Internet in reverse.” Dytham and partner Astrid Klein, who also run a Tokyo-based architecture firm together, devised the evenings in 2003 as a way of getting to know and share ideas with their professional peers. Three years later, and what at first seemed like a cliquey Tokyo phenomenon is now extending its reach as far afield as Shanghai, Vienna and Buenos Aires. One of the first cities to catch on was London. “We held our first two events in August last year,” says Marcus Fairs, co-organizer of the London event and editor of Icon magazine. “Even though it was the middle of the summer, no-one had heard of Pecha Kucha, and we didn’t advertise at all, both events were total sellouts.” Last month, the city hosted its biggest Pecha Kucha yet, with 1,500 aficionados greeting such creative luminaries as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Tunisian-born designer Tom Dixon. “It’s new, it’s improvised and chaotic,” says Viktor Oldiges, organizer of the recently launched Shanghai evenings. That certainly doesn’t sound like any presentation we’ve sat through before. To find a Pecha Kucha Night near you, visit pecha-kucha.org.
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