Designer Karaoke

As part of Bristol Design Festival, I was invited to give a mini-presentation by RIO – the Real Ideas Organisation. Fortunately for the audience no singing was required.

The topic of the event was Design for the Future, with a focus on the impact of young people on design, and how design can be ethically and socially responsible. If anything, my talk was about designing for the past, with examples of using local historical archives in film and on websites.

To keep things snappy, the format of the evening employed a Petcha Kutcha approach (pronounced pa-charch-ka in case you’re wondering). Each presenter is allowed 20 images, shown for 20 seconds each. That’s a pithy 6 minutes 40 seconds per person with a strict one minute gap between talks.

With presenters forced to be concise, and the audience not looking at their watches, the pace and length seems perfect for a brief overview of any subject. The other speakers were Lyndsay Grant and Clara Lemon from Futurelab; Scott Farlow; Claire Selman; Conway and Young; Kate Rudman; Rob Law of Trunki; Romy, Sandra and Tanya from Knowle West Media Centre and Walter Jack. Big thanks goes to Holly from RIO for organising the event.