The Sounds of Chatter

By JURO OSAWA

TOKYO -- The hip crowd here at the stylish SuperDeluxe bar is energized and it's not the beer they're drinking that's generating the buzz.

It's Pecha Kucha Night, a two-hour show-and-tell event that takes place the last Wednesday of each month for designers, architects and other creative types to display their work and share ideas. Tonight marks the 52nd gathering and it's standing-room only, with 300 people in attendance.

What started as a social event in Tokyo -- "pecha kucha" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for chattering -- has quickly grown into a global phenomenon. Since its launch here in 2003, the event has spread to 133 cities around the world, from Adelaide to Zurich, though they all function independently of each other. Architects, artists, designers of all types and curious onlookers go to network and be entertained.

"Pecha Kucha is a good starting point for exploring the (local) art scene," says Noriko Shiraishi, a construction consultant who frequents museums and galleries on weekends.

Sebastian Mayer for The Wall Street Journal

Two presenters and their PowerPoint slide shows at a recent Tokyo Pecha Kucha Night at SuperDeluxe bar.

Now the original organizers, Tokyo-based European architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, plan to leverage the global Pecha Kucha network into a foundation that will award financial grants to back the best ideas at a Pecha Kucha event.

On a recent night in Tokyo, after a brief introduction by Ms. Klein and Mr. Dytham, whose firm Klein Dytham Architecture (KDa) co-owns the host bar, presentations begin at 8:30. The rules are simple: Show 20 slides, for 20 seconds each, for a total of six minutes and 40 seconds. As long as you follow these guidelines -- though video is fine, too -- you can talk about almost anything. There is no fee to show slides at the nonprofit event, but audience members must pay about $9 at the door -- that includes one drink -- to cover venue costs.

The first exhibitor is Tamami Iinuma, a photographer in her mid-20s. Among her 20 images is a photo illustration of two identical-looking elephants. "One of the two is real, and the other is a stuffed (museum) elephant. But...we can't tell them apart," she says.

Ms. Iinuma is followed by 13 others -- Pecha Kucha Tokyo typically caps the evening at 14 -- including one show about a trip to the snowy volcanic mountains of Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. After the first hour, the basement space, with its bare concrete walls, was packed like a Tokyo morning commuter train.

"The chief reason Pecha Kucha became so popular is that there's no other place in cities where young people can show their work," says Mr. Dytham, who was born in the U.K. and is in his early 40s. Magazines tend to cover mostly established artists and designers, and in some cities, fledgling artists have to pay galleries large sums to exhibit their work, he says.

Pecha Kucha is more accessible. Participants reserve a spot by submitting their slides to KDa a few days in advance. A presentation may be rejected if it smacks of advertising, religious recruiting or if it's sexually explicit, but this rarely happens, says Mr. Dytham. Some of the unconventional programs in Tokyo have included an anthropological history of the fetish for buttocks and a photo collection of various Japanese funeral cars. About half of the presentations are made in Japanese and half are made in English.

Sebastian Mayer for The Wall Street Journal

But Pecha Kucha isn't just for budding talents. Some big-name designers seem to like the informal atmosphere of these evenings. Tokyo has hosted world-renowned Japanese architects Jun Aoki, who designed the Louis Vuitton stores in Japan and New York, and Toyo Ito, who created the innovative Tod's building on the upscale Tokyo shopping street Omotesando. Mr. Ito exhibited architectural designs he had submitted to competitions that ultimately lost. British-based furniture and accessories designer Tom Dixon has participated twice at London's Pecha Kucha.

Both Ms. Klein and Mr. Dytham, the designers behind Uniqlo's global flagship store in Tokyo and a shining, artificial forest in front of Laforet in Harajuku, say they never intended for the event to go global. It began as a way for the pair to help promote the operation of SuperDeluxe, which KDa opened with partners in 2003. The bar has since become one of Tokyo's most popular venues for indie and avant-garde music, film, dance and other performances.

"We never said to anyone, 'How about you start a Pecha Kucha in your city?'" says Mr. Dytham. Rather, the idea caught on the way the best ones always do, by word of mouth.

The impetus to start one in Dubai, for example, emerged over a drink in Tokyo. On a trip to Japan in June 2007, Simone Sebastian, a 24-year-old Dubai-based events producer, went with a friend to SuperDeluxe one night. The conversation eventually turned to Pecha Kucha. Ms. Sebastian says she found the idea "appealing right off the bat." A few months later, she and four partners launched Pecha Kucha in Dubai; so far, they've hosted three events.

While most of the presentations in Tokyo consist of slide shows and narrations, in other cities, such as Hong Kong, slides are sometimes accompanied by music and dance.

Some Pecha Kucha events have hit the design world's big-time: In June 2006, London hosted 1,500 people, as part of the London Architecture Biennale. In Tokyo in November, a special Pecha Kucha held during DesignTide, a major annual trade show, attracted 2,000 people.

Ms. Klein and Mr. Dytham are now planning the next step: To set up a foundation that will award scholarship money to back outstanding projects and ideas shown at the Pecha Kucha Nights around the world. The endowment will be sponsored by California-based Autodesk Inc. (KDa does no business with Autodesk, but the software maker's chief executive, Carl Bass, is a big fan of Pecha Kucha.)

A contest will determine who gets money. Details are still being worked out, but in one scenario, it would take place mostly on the Web on a site that is currently being built. Any veteran participant of a Pecha Kucha event anywhere in the world would be eligible to enter the competition by loading a presentation onto the site. Visitors to the site could then vote for their favorites. The top 100 vote-getters would go to the judges (a group that might include Mr. Dytham), who would settle on the winner or winners. For now, Mr. Dytham is contemplating a grant of as much as $15,000.

Winners may be selected based on a set of criteria that could include a pro-social or pro-environment bent. While this may seem to go against the spirit of the event, which welcomes all types of creative minds regardless of the degree of social awareness, Mr. Dytham says, "We are just trying to move away from design for design's sake."

By providing the funds to turn good ideas into reality, Mr. Dytham and Ms. Klein hope that the foundation will make a difference in the world. "Pecha Kucha should use all this creative power" and aim toward a greater good, says Ms. Klein.