Results tagged “presentations”

Blogging's been light because this part of March is the heart of the conference season for me, usually stretching for a few exhausting weeks on the road. My new goal this year was to take it a little easier, pace myself better, get more sleep and exercise, and then try to make the things I do participate in get enough focus that they're done well.

That seems to be working out, especially as I come back to SXSW for the first time in years. Some nice mentions in Wired talking about my Battledecks presentation (see also a video clip which captures most of the presentation), both Valleywag and CNet talking about this year's amazingly-successful kickball game, and a really amusing bunch of conversations on Twitter that show just how much people like a pithy soundbite when participating in a panel. It's been fun seeing everybody in person, but I can't say I'm not ready to go home.

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.