• [from julienorvaisas] Need More Calm? [Do Nothing for 2 Minutes] – [If you do give up PowerPoint this week, you may find yourself with a little time on your hands. In that case, consider spending two minutes at donothingfor2minutes.com. It seems to be as much about taunting you for your inability to leave your mouse and keyboard alone for two minutes as it is about encouraging relaxation and meditation. If you achieve the modest goal they set forth you are met with some marketing. If you don't you are told that you FAIL.] Need more calm? We're thinking about additional tools we could create to aid relaxation. If you'd like to know if we launch something, pop in your email below.
• [from julienorvaisas] Say No to PowerPoint Week [Fast Company] – [Though PowerPoint certainly can be a powerful communication tool, are we turning to it too often out of collective habit? It is the expected medium; we deliver it. But do we really need the same tool for every objective? Storytelling, sales, reporting… it's rare that PowerPoint is questioned as the go-to move for any of the above on projects, for business meetings or at conferences. Edward Tufte has been on this for years of course: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint] Suffering from PowerPoint fatigue? You're not alone. Tech conferences, including Demo and Finovate, have banned boring slide shows in favor of short, fast-paced product demos.

I started today by typing up all of the Post-it notes you saw in our recent blog post on Synthesis.

This activity created a 6-page Word document of bullet points.

The next part of the process is something I always find challenging: taking an incredibly detailed list of observations, particpant statements, hypotheses, and ideas; figuring out what the Big Ideas are (there’s a point in the process where many of them seem Big!), and putting those into a form that tells a cogent story.

First step: make a cup of tea.

Ok, then my next steps were:

• Categorize all those bullet points
• Synthesize those categories a bit further
• Write down in as short a paragraph as possible what I would tell someone who asked me, “what did you find out?”

Then I went into PowerPoint, which is what we use when we present findings to our clients. I’ll continue bouncing back and forth between Word and PowerPoint; each piece of software supports a different way of thinking and writing.

I dropped my synthesized categories into a presentation file, sifted all of the bullet points from my Word doc into the new categories, and then started carving and shaping it all so that it started to follow the paragraph I had written. (I’m mixing cooking and sculpting metaphors here.)

I printed out the presentation draft, and laid it out so I could see the whole thing at once.

Steve came back from a meeting and I asked him to read over what I’d printed out. He started writing notes on my printouts, pulling out what he saw as the biggest of the Big Ideas.

We talked about what he’d written, which led to an energetic discussion in which we really started to breathe life into this. Tomorrow, I’ll start the day by iterating the presentation draft based on our conversation.

At the closing Dcamp dinner, Eugene Chen told me about a cool event he’d been to called Pecha Kucha where participants show 20 images each, each for 20 seconds. I couldn’t remember what it was called, but today I stumble across on the web. Less than 48 hours after I first heard about it. I love synchronicity.

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese term that roughly translates as chit-chat, or perhaps as irritating chatter.
Pecha Kucha is a lot of fun for short attention spans.
Pecha Kucha is a new kind of venue for anyone involved in, or interested in, architecture, design, fashion, and art.
Pecha Kucha is intended to inspire a broad mix of participants – from well-known practitioners to students, recent graduates, and new firms presenting their work for the first time.

Eugene didn’t emphasize the design-y aspect of it; just seemed like it could be about anything, at least around the table we began brainstorming ways to work within the seemingly tight constraints. As images go by automatically every 20 seconds, you could speak to each one, or you could speak to a larger story that is paced along with the images, or you could be out of sync (or in reverse) with the sequence of images, etc. There’s a lot of potential besides just a super-quick presentation linearly.

I guess it’s going on all over the world but the event was created and is somehow owned by Tokyo’s Klein Dytham Architecture. I’ll have to check it out soon!

Update: I did!