Pecha Kucha

I had to post at least once while sitting in a SXSW talk, so here it is...

Can Pecha Kucha be a valuable format for condensed information transfer? I'm slowly processing Edward Tufte's work, and I buy the idea that we do harm by excessive filtering of information to make it palatable to our audience. But for certain topics, environments, and audiences, it makes a lot of sense to condense material.

Pecha Kucha is a style of presentation in which you present 20 slides for 20 seconds each. Transitions are timed, which forces the presenter to make quick and steady progress. The total presentation time comes out at 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Thinking about it reminds me of Dick Hardt's legendary Identity 2.0 presentation.

The Wikipedia article mentions the value for business applications, an area that hits close to home:

This is primarily a device to help ... force presenters to be more focused in their message, allow them to flow uninterrupted, and ultimately to avoid the "death by powerpoint" syndrome, of sitting through long and often tedious powerpoint presentations.

It could be a digestible format for some of the BarCamp presentations.

The New Generation of Graffiti

This is awesome. The Graffiti Research Lab built a system that uses a laser pointer to control a video projection that they can shine on buildings.

There's a howto here: GRL Laster Tag Howto

Dynamite Surfing?

Have you ever cooked with Spam?

I may be late to the party, but I just noticed Gmail's spam screen contains ads for spam recipes. It's kind of a nice break from scanning my loan approvals (I've got a great credit rating!), and things Darius said are incredible, and mis-addressed mail ("Frederick, I guess I'll give one to Sandro") looking for legitimate messages.

The No-Click Interface

I like to see people trying to push boundaries, especially if they're not entirely sure what the outcome will be. DONTCLICK.IT is an interesting pursuit in the field of interaction design, thrown my way by my friend Oliver.

The interface is designed to obviate the need for mouse clicks. I do feel a slight urge to click, but it's not that strong. I haven't done it accidentally yet. I did click once on purpose to see the result. It's gratifying. Maybe I should look for a job in QA. :)

ikea hacker - A Great Idea

Here's an example of remix culture at work -- ikea hacker. This blog (microsite?) encourages people to share their customizations of IKEA's products.

People hunting for ideas get their fix. IKEA gets free product research. The verdict: everyone wins.

Hey Corporations -- please don't be afraid of this.

Folding Chair

Cool concept for a chair!

Color-based search

I love this product search by colors. I haven't figured out the wider uses for it, but for coordinating clothes or housewares, it seems pretty cool.

A step up would be to match photos uploaded with products whose colors match the photo content. Variable lighting conditions for user-submitted photos could be a problem, but I think you could achieve some decent results.

Crass Chic

I find these vulgar cards humorous. I've been drawn to the whole crass chic thing recently.


For Christmas, I got my family some of those funky notepads at Urban Outfitters with salutations like, "This is fucking urgent ...", and "Hey Shithead ...". Cheap, I know.

I also can't get over this shirt: