Pecha Kucha Beirut V13

(Bad photos due to Admin N’s sloppy lifestyle, and her crush on Japenese men and by the way she met one at Pecha Kucha and got totally distracted!! oops too much gossiping now back to her, sorry!)

Pecha Kucha Beirut V13

By admin N : I’ve always had an obsession with talks and presentation, the art of body language and voice tone manipulation have always fascinated me and led me to constantly try to improve my own presentations. Consequently, it would be only logical that I’d be a huge TED fan.

However, more recently, I was introduced to ‘Pecha Kucha’.

Pecha Kucha was actually conceived in Japan in 2003 as a way for designers to meet, network and share ideas. The presentation itself relies on the 20×20 concept: each presenter has 20 slides and talks about each slide in 20 seconds. Since then, Pecha Kucha has become a worldwide event, taking place in over 490 cities around the world; and of course in Beirut.

It was a last minute thing, someone had tweeted about it on the same day and we decided to grab that chance and attend the Pecha Kucha vol. 13 that took place on the 29th of Feb. Now for technical reasons (yea right!), we were not able to attend from the start but we were able to arrive just in time to bathe our ears with the oh so enchanting music of EPISODE. GO! CHECK! NOW! These guys are awesome, a mix of violin, drums and base with a very experimental feel to their sound. Ok, I’m calming down now, sorry for the enthusiasm burst. Let’s move on to the presentations.

After a short break (some more EPISODE + and some refreshing jack daniel’s), the presentations were back on. First up, Loryne Atoui and ‘one wig stand’: a very interesting presentation about taboos and cancer (mainly breast cancer). Loryne was engaging and funny, plus she gave us pins! So thumbs up that. Next up was Maher Bsaibes, a fashion designer who presented his work in the form of a story with a soft music playing in the background. Although Maher’s presentation seemed interesting, I was kind of lost with what was going on, I did not understand what it was all about until we reached the end which was a disappointment because he seemed to have a pretty good concept. Then, Rani Rajji came on with ‘use it’. Rani Rajji is the owner ‘studio beirut’, very cool projects and a keen sense of humor, but why did you have to read man, WHY?! After Rajji was Nasri Atallah’s turn, our man in Beirut, the twerson who made me aware of the event. Nasri was hilarious and had a very engaging presentation. And finally, the last one to present was the hilarious Doreen Toutikian with a presentation on the Desmeem project:  collaboration between Arabic and European designers aiming at finding solutions to different social issues through design.

All in all, I can say that Pecha Kucha had a very good vibe to it, we had lots of fun and we do look forward to the next event that should take place by July. See you around!