Pecha-Kucha

I attend the Pecha-Kucha event in Shanghai hosted by the Dutch Culture Center. For those of you who don't know what Pecha-Kucha is, (I didn't know until the day of the event) here is a quote from their website.

"PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.
It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace."

The format works quite well. It prevents presenters from being too wordy, or the audience from falling asleep from a boring lecturer. Unless they are all boring, which luckily didn't happen this time. There are some presentations That I want to delve deeper into, but for this post, I will run down my notes from the night. It was dark and I had to scribble blind, but I think I got some pretty good notes down.





Michelle Yeh :  Dutch Culture Center
The place hosting the event. Promoted an Idea called "Sustainability in Cultural Exchange", Followed by some of their future events, non of which I'll make it to before leaving Shanghai.

Allison "Mary Ching" Young: Mary Ching
Shoe designer. She presented some interesting ideas. For her collection, she focused on the tension between east and west present in shanghai. Words she used to describe her collection: Tension, Shanghai, Opium; Her clients: Seductive, mystique, playful.
She blogs at Maryching.blogspot.com (might be NSFW)

Stephany Chu: Architecture for Humanity
I attended a symposium my Freshman year that had a speaker from Architecture for Humanity. Their message is pretty much the same here. They are the doctors without borders of the architecture world. They offer free design services and outreach to communities badly in need of help. They do some extraordinary things and are able to solicit funding from corporations.

Francheska Galeazzeti: ARUP Associates
Now this one was a big surprise. ARUP enters the show with a presentation about Education for a sustainable future. They apparently do a lot of charitable work. She stressed education as one of the most important things needed for our world to move foward. With balanced education for every child, they can grow up to make choices that change our world for the better. Another problem raised by Francheska is translating complex engineering (which ARUP is good at) to simple construction techniques (that local labor can understand and adapt to their traditional techniques).

Yareem Park: Zaha Hadid
"Robots in Architecture"
Another Huge surprise. However, she did NOT deliver on the robots side that was promised by the title. Her presentation is like re-living Arch in the City Class. Following works were listed.
Walknig City - Archigram
Horizontal Movement- Theo Jansen
Bordeaux House - OMA
U2 Videoscreen - Hoberman
Transforming Surface - Hoberman
Institute D'arab- Jean Novel
Sustainable Dancefloor - Enve Doll
Tactile Interactive - Fox Lin

Frau Anna: Frau Anna
Clothing designer
She's kind of a funky person. She's kind of a great person. Her presentation was simple. She likes colors, colors make her/us happy, clothes should be comfortable first, expressive second. Buy her stuff.

Graham Smith
Robotics guy, built his first robot to shoot panorama pictures. Really liked saying "you can walk into another time." talked alot about Telepresence, which is basicly web conferenceing, attached to a robot that moves arround. Apparently it produces weird pheonomons such as making autistic kids interact easier with other people, make kids do better in school, get Graham arrested, and other interesting things. He has a show coming up where people can drive robots around via internet, won't be in shanghai for the actual show, maybe i'll see if i can "telepresence" through his robots.

Ran Ran
He had one of the funniest and most interesting presentations. He faced the screen the entire time. He began with,
"I cannot see your tears,
because you're in water.
I can see your sadness,
because I love you."
From there, he goes on to his Fishouse project. Which is a fantastic rethinking of why there is that one iconic fishbowl shape, and what modifying that shape can do to how we interact with our pet fish.

The Nut
I had no idea what was going on, but free stuff was thrown around.

Dutchdesignworkspace.com
A new workspace for dutch designers and artists in Shanghai. Our favorites MVRDV are opening an office there in October. They are open to visits any day of the week.

Yeoh Gh: Supernature
a design firm dedicated to bringing nature into daily life. Hide the tech and capture moments where people interact with their work. They work with a lot of new technologies to produce an interactive and surreal works of art.
Supernaturedesign.com

Christine and Eddie
Prison City
Ahh a revisit to our old favorite, the panopticon. It raised ideas on how certain city layouts function like the panopticon, with government buildings in a central location, and how it heightens the feeling of authority. Other examples diverge, where public space enters the government buildings, and what was once a closed center of authority, becomes transpartent. From here they move onto yokohoma terminal, with the ambiguity of public and private space, and interior and exterior.

Eric Andt: Habitat for Humanity
He talked about what habitat is doing in China, which is quite different from what they do in the States. They aim to enhance minority housing, disaster relief. One problem they highlighted was the lack of volunteers' construction skills. This seems to be a common problem with projects like these.

Parkour Guys
They pretty much had the same old powerpoint of anyone talking about parkour, then one guy did a flip and strained his back.

Nevelle Mars: Dynamic City Foundation
This guy hit upon an important point in China's growth. The extremely rapid urbanization. It is difficult if not impossible for China to be green under such expansion speeds. Greening has to occur on the levels of home, building, block, city, and finally society for any real change to take effect.