Pecha Kucha night is a concept held in major cities all around the world, where architects, artists, food folk, designers, writers, engineers, community workers etc, present 20 slides for 20 seconds. This format asks for the presenters to master the art of concise presentations.
These passionate and creative people tell their stories and unleash their ideas into the community.
Last night was 1 of the 4 events held each year, and was held in the backyard of the SCAF in Paddington. The theme was innovation and technology and its cultural impact. From all the speakers, I thought the following stood out:
Vert Design is a design company, that focusses on green (=vert) or sustainable design.
In his talk, he described the process of an experiment of making small plastic toy armymen from plastic waste, that grew to the major business opportunity of producing dental fixtures for dental corporations.
If you’re interested, have a read of this interview. Andrew says the future of design is: “Mass customisation. As manufacturing methods change, we will move away from million part product runs to smaller runs with product being printed and grown instead of molded.”
James took his 6 minutes to describe what FoodOrbit is all about. FoodOrbit takes out the middle man in the food supply chain, connecting chefs to farmers. This way, chefs know where their food comes from (including you eating it in their restaurant), and the farmers have a more efficient way of selling their produce (instead of being dependent on wholesalers or individual sales on a famer’s markets).
Sustainability is becoming a ‘cool’ thing to do, but it’s actually a practise you find in areas where it’s a necessity from a affordability point of view.
Here’s some more info about James Nathan.
Mark Simpson – the Happiness Project
Mark started the happiness project because he believes in altruism – the more you give and make others happy, the more happy you become yourself. They want to involve as many people as possible in thinking about happiness so started a competition looking for people who can implement big awesome happy ideas. The base funding for the project is $12000. There is the possibility that in the Popular Vote stage of the project that you might be able to generate additional funds for your project.
See the video for the project here.
Event picture: https://twitter.com/FoodOrbit
