AQR Pecha Kucha, December 2009

Just when we thought they couldn’t get any better, Chloe Fowler and Elle Atton produce a top knotch Pecha Kucha. The quality of the speakers, the superb hosting by WallaceSpace, the quick wittedness of our MC (Richie Jones, FreshMinds)… What a combination, leading to an electric Pecha Kucha in December.

First, thanks to our speakers: Neil Cantle from Synovate, Katie Jones and Gemma Stokes from Acacia Avenue, Jonny Wooldridge from The Thinking Shed, Debbie Nathan and Hannah Wilson from TNS, Andy Cooper from The Nursery and Rob Thomas from Practical Semiotics.

We also played with the format to allow open mic speakers to have a go at creating last minute, truncated PK’s, resulting in six fantastic speakers from River Research, Snapdragon Recruitment, Inon, FreshMinds, Sherbert Research and Kindle Research. Our reviewer, Amanda Powell, is exactly the target audience we had in mind when initiating Pecha Kucha nights; new to the industry, keen, cool and clever.

Review

As a research newcomer I set off to my first industry event, the AQR Pecha Kucha evening. Something to do with Pokémon, I wonder?

I arrive to find people laughing and chatting. I spy some complimentary beverages. I could fit in here. Not a single Pokémon in sight. Time to make friends. I help myself to a delicious but potent onion canapé. OK, maybe making friends wasn’t going to be a definite.

I watch and learn as we see some brave bodies deliver a smooth 6 minutes and 40 seconds of unexpectedly diverse infotainment. The talks were not merely presentations crammed into shorter time spans (which could be the easy mistake), but instead, creatively delivered presentations ranging from Japanese body language, to ‘co-creation’ as a misunderstood term; from Twitter and its new uses, to the ever growing application of semiotics.

We saw the witty, the poetic, and the downright cheeky. One guy cleverly managed to use no words at all, but really I think he too ate one of the onion things. For me, the common theme of the evening (yes, there’s always one) was that the sheer broadness of topics highlighted what a relevant and all-encompassing role research has in understanding all communications.

The most laughs went to Andy Cooper of The Nursery, who gave a hilarious rundown of why we love to work in research, which if anything served as a reminder to me that I’d done well to choose this career path.

This night was an inspiring event, giving people the chance to shamelessly show off their useful knowledge and opinions or, in my case, shamelessly showing off my job-hunting skills. I left feeling like I’d met a lot of forward-thinking and open minded people and I will definitely be going to the next one – even if it’s just an excuse to have a drink on a Monday.

Amanda Powell