Somewhere in the middle of 22,000 sq ft of designjunc­tion splendour we sat down and listened to the 11 brave souls who stood between us and the free bar at Pecha Kucha. Actually, they did pretty well and we had our beers stashed away under a robust Vitra EA 105 chair anyhow. A big audi­ence in a big space (lots more than can squeeze into Modus!) James Dyson watching from son Jake’s stand near the front, dodgy acous­tics, video cam­eras all over the place. Enough to make even a pol­ished speaker nervous.

The format allows the speakers to use 20 slides for 20 seconds each played meci­lessly on a laptop and pro­jected on a large screen. Devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham to stop designers and archi­tects from droning on for too long in front of their beau­tiful present­a­tions. The first one was in 2003 and if you haven’t been to one yet, you should go. Pecha Kucha is Japanese for chit-chat.

We were enter­tained and edu­cated in equal measure, from rioting pros­ti­tutes to over­spilled sand-casting. Helen Parton kicked off with a whizzy tour of office interiors but I didn’t get to shoot her due to chat involve­ments. Sorry Helen. Here are the others:

:: Sam Johnson ::

“From a speakers per­spective it was a tough audi­ence! PK was designed to stop cre­at­ives talking for hours on end and to keep the audi­ence engaged: it’s a resounding suc­cess. Next step — politi­cians?” SamJohnsonDesign.com