February 20 - International PechaKucha Day

Posted on February 20, 2020

Chit-chat!

That's what PechaKucha means, in Japanese. But this hot new-ish term doesn't really refer to casual back-and-forth chats. Rather, it's a presentation or storytelling format. 

And it's all about 20 x 20 - which is perfect for the year 2020!

The presenter shows 20 slides, with 20 seconds of commentary on each slide. That means that the entire presentation is pretty short: just 6 minutes and 40 seconds total.






A lot of schools, industries, and cities now have PechaKucha Nights, in which individuals share presentations of their work to others. There are typically 8 to 14 presentations in a PK night. 


The whole idea is to "talk less, show more," so it tends to be used a lot in visual-heavy fields such as product or fashion design, architecture, photography, art, and so forth. But PK presentations are also used in educational settings, by the travel industry, and among collectors and hobbyists.



Today is the first International PechaKucha Day (02/20/2020 is a pretty good date for a storytelling format that features 20 x 20). The PK community hopes to inspire the most PK events and presentations on this one night and asks PK presenters to tag and share with the hashtag #ipk2020.


I have noticed how popular TED Talks have become over the past 30 years, and people can now stream past TED Talks (there is a TED Talks podcast "channel," a TED channel on YouTube, and Spotify offers TED Talks as well). PK is sort of the same idea - but WAAAAY shorter and way more visual. I would say it's a bit like the Instagram of presentations.



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