Pecha Kucha for Activists
Slideshow Forum Night is an Ideal Mechanism for Social Change
Pecha Kucha Night was conceived in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein-Dytham Architecture as a public forum for up-and-coming designers. The format has since been adopted by communities worldwide toward seemingly unlimited ends. Artists,writers, race car drivers, musicians, comedians, marketers, designers and planners in over 148 communities have hosted Pecha Kucha Nights.
The format is simple. An audience, an intimate setting, a presenter with a message and a power point or slideshow projector are all that’s required to hold a Pecha Kucha Night. Participants show 20 slides for 20 seconds each, giving them a total of 6 minutes and forty seconds to get their message across.
While the Pecha Kucha format helps showcase talent and facilitate communication among all creative types, it can be an especially powerful tool for activists and other agents of social change. It's like jam night for humanitarians.
The Medium is the Message
When Marshall McLuhan famously wrote“the medium is the message," meaning that "the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” The medium of a French salon, in which participants are given the opportunity to discuss ideas and ideals at their leisure, yields a different society with different ideological patterns than the medium of television, which is primarily visual, brief and one-sided. In other words, those of us raised on television think and act very differently than those raised on intimate community dialogue.
Both community and dialogue are essential components of Pecha Kucha, but the primary aim of activists is action. New perspectives and potential solutions to issues must be got to the heart of quickly. Pecha Kucha demands clarity and precision, which in activism means the distillation of ideas into solutions.
Pecha Kucha combines the dialogue and intimacy of a French salon or a New England town hall meeting with the multimedia appeal of the Internet and the unlimited scope of the global citizen. It is both intimate and inclusive, both grass-roots and global.
Background Chatter
Translated from the Japanese, the term pecha kucha means "background chatter". This could refer to the fact that common people, rarely heard publicly except as background chatter, are given equal time and opportunity for creative public expression at a Pecha Kucha Night. It could also refer to the dialogue that ensues among audiences and participants after a notable presentation. Either way, it sheds light on why Pecha Kucha is an ideal mechanism for social change.
The French salon, precurser to Pecha Kucha Night
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