Pecha Kucha and Presentations

Pecha Kucha, or ペチャクチャin the original Japanese, is a presentation style which places limitations on the presenter which they must overcome in order to give a good presentation. The rules of Pecha Kucha are simple, each presenter has to give a presentation consisting of 20 slides, each of which will be displayed for just 20 seconds. This means the presenter has to complete their presentation in 6 minutes 40 seconds.

Pecha Kucha events take place all over the world (if you are interested check out the website http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ ) and are often used as an opportunity for designers or people in creative industries to show their work, but it is not just limited to creative areas. Notable British celebrities like comedian Johnny Vegas, actress Joanna Lumley and journalist Jon Snow have taken part in Pecha Kucha nights.



University presentations usually won’t be in Pecha Kucha style (although sometimes they are, your tutor will tell you what they expect), but you can still use Pecha Kucha to help with your work. The essence of Pecha Kucha is brevity and directness, you must say what you need to say in a very short amount of time. How does this help with presentations at university? It’s quite easy when writing a presentation for your lecturer and/or class to panic and try to include everything you know about the topic, whether it is necessary or not. This can result in slides packed with too much information and scripts containing far more words than you can say in your allotted time. The results are sprawling presentations which lack focus.

Whilst writing your presentation try and adapt it to fit into a Pecha Kucha style. 20 slides, each on screen for 20 seconds. 6 minutes 40 seconds. Can you get your presentation to fit into this time? Is 20 seconds long enough to read your slides?

Working to tight limits like this will help you focus. A slide that cannot be read in a 20 second Pecha Kucha slot will not work in a general presentation either, crowded slides which take a long time to read will cause the audience to stop reading and maybe even lose interest completely if there are a lot of them. Slides are there to aid your talk, not overload the audience with information. Pecha Kucha’s limited time on each slide shows up perfectly how overcrowded slides can fail.


From http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/.

The time limit will also help your speech. The purpose of the limited time to speak is not to encourage the speaker to talk faster, but to use fewer words. It is very easy in all assignments to ‘waffle’, to say things over and over in slightly different ways, to go off on tangents, and to use too many words in an attempt to make your piece sound more ‘academic’. When you only have 6 minutes 40 seconds to say everything you need to say, you will find you will need to concentrate on what you want to say, to say it as simply and effectively as possible. Precise, direct language is the best sort to use in presentations. Flowery, convoluted or irrelevant language will only hinder your audience’s understanding of your presentation.

These lessons, all of which can be learnt by writing a Pecha Kucha presentation, will help make your presentation better. You can also get together with some coursemates to have a Pecha Kucha event where you all give your Pecha Kucha presentations. They can give you feedback on your presentation and you can practice talking in front of a crowd. As the presentation is only 6 minutes 40 seconds long it will seem less daunting than a 10 or 20 minute talk, and should help you overcome any nerves you might have.