Entries tagged “constraints”

[P]erhaps the two best examples of how [religion-based food] bans have resulted in delicious and fascinating food are Jain cooking, with its ban on anything that remotely involves taking life, like root vegetables (little critters might get killed while you dig them up) or yoghurt left overnight (too alive), and Jewish cooking, with its complex set of Torah derived rules including bans on pork, on fish without scales (shark, shellfish) and on cooking milk and meat together. I'm not concerned at the moment with the logic of these bans, just their results.

That's from a fascinating article in India's Economic Times. As much reverence as there is in American culture for "thinking outside the box", I'm always fascinated by the things people cook up by rooting around inside the box.

We know that PowerPoint can be a tool of productivity, and hopefully everyone's embraced the idea that constraints are conducive to creativity. The next natural step, then, is Pecha Kucha, introducing the constraint of PowerPoint presentations that are limited to twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each.

Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down is Wired's take on the presentation format, written up by Dan Pink. But far more impressively, he's created his own presentation in the format, and it's a smart and thoughtful look at the emotional expressiveness of signage in public spaces.

Pink's presentation is a delight. For my own tastes, a well-rehearsed slideshow should go a lot faster than one slide every twenty seconds, but I realize this is still much better than most presentations where people linger on a single slide for 5 minutes and read you all the bullet points. And for Pink's images, the timing works almost perfectly. (When I spoke at OSCON in 2006, I did 72 slides in 12 minutes, which I think works out to about one every ten seconds. Any slower than that and I think I would start to bore people.)

• Last week I wrote a bit more about Office Tools of Expression
• 20×2 is a long-running Austin tradition tied to the SXSW festival where twenty speakers answer the same question with two minutes each for their answers.