Tokyo Story: Creative Potential of Pecha Kucha

Marcus Bird delivering his Pecha Kucha. See the video here

Marcus Bird of the Jamaican in Japan blog spoke with me recently about his fascination with the Tokyo creative scene and the various opportunities he has had. This is the first part of three in Bird's Tokyo Story. Through his experience of living and working in Japan he has evolved as designer. One of the stories he shared was about when he presented his creative ideas and character designs at a Tokyo Pecha Kucha night. He found that it is a strong way of networking and sharing his unique creative thought. He explains the presentation format here.

ART:Jamaica: I saw your blog where you presented a Pechakucha presentation in Tokyo. What is Pechakucha and how did you come to be talking about your ideas in Tokyo?

Marcus Bird: Pechakucha is a creative forum where everyone has to present in the same format. So you get twenty seconds and a limit of twenty slides. So you get a little over six minutes to talk about your ideas, projects, a philosophy, anything. I was able to present because I met this guy named Jean who runs a monthly meetup for creatives called Pause Talk. He is responsible for Pecha Kucha in Tokyo, and after going to his thing a few times I decided to pitch an idea to the Pechakucha team. They said it was cool, and luckily for me it fell right in Tokyo design week.

Talking about Tokyo, I have to say that the city right now is the  biggest representation for me of me trying to actualize my creative concepts. I was living in a small town in Shizuoka when I first went to Japan, and trust me, I wasn’t inspired by living there at all. My first trip to Tokyo a few months afterwards was … how do I say this? EXPLOSIVE! (laughs) After a year of being somewhat disgruntled where I was, I just decided to go. I moved to Tokyo, found a place and then started getting into the scene. If you are a creative person, Tokyo is a place constantly overflowing with ideas, colours and sounds; like a living battery. The more creative people I met doing things in Tokyo, the more I started to envision myself doing stuff creatively in Tokyo as well. Pecha Kucha was a representation of that; me doing a presentation based around the same questions I was asking myself about my creative journey and where I felt it was going. That’s why I called it “Untitled Design”, because that's how I think about stuff you want to achieve that isn’t clear yet. It has a form, a shape, but its still untitled until it is ready to be revealed.

Check out this video on how Pecha Kucha works and the format. Has Pecha Kucha night happened in Jamaica? I wonder how we could use this format as contemporary artists as a way to effectively convey our ideas to anyone or as a creative medium itself?
Next: Bird discusses his ideas about 'Lifestyle Design'