Dennis Dong is a seasoned presenter at Pecha Kucha Night in Sacramento. Here he shares his experiences in an interview, as told by Colleen Belcher. This text is taken from an interview, it is in first person, however, it has been constructed in writing below by Colleen Belcher.

I first heard about Pecha Kucha Night by reading about it in various magazines architectural magazines and it sounded like a real neat thing.

I saw a little clip that they were starting an organization in Sacramento and I sent Claire Obenson, the Sacramento chapter's organizer, an e-mail asking her what's required and what's needed to be able to sign up for a presentation.

She e-mailed me back and said "Well, Pecha Kucha is basically for the young and the brave."

My response was "Well, I'm really not that young."

Claire wrote back: "Oh - well that's just young at heart you're more than welcome to present."

I attended the first Pecha Kucha Night. I was a little bit nervous because you don't know who's going to be there and you don't know if anyone is really interested in what you have to present.

I practiced a couple times just because I didn't want to overly embarrass myself. It was a lot of fun, I think there were five presenters that first night and all on various subjects.

I've presented three times all together.

The first couple times it was at Hina's Tea House and it was kind of strange because it stayed open for regular business while we were giving presentations so some of the regular customers were kind of a little bit taken by surprise. But I think they had a good time also.

What I like best about Pecha Kucha Night is the peer presentation — you just get up and you have a very definite timeframe. You are able to get across your subject in a short period of time. It puts pressure on you but it's just very refreshing and very challenging.

There are some instances where 20 seconds is certainly not enough time to talk about one particular slide and there are some times where in 20 seconds you run out of things to say and it seems like it's an eternity. There's just this dead silence and you're thinking, "C'mon. Next slide. C'mon."

My presentations have been on 'Anonymous Architecture' - that's what I call them.

The first one was on maintenance buildings. The second one was on fire stations and the third one was just everything in between.

And what I did for instance like on the maintenance buildings - I took a number of projects and tried to highlight the projects as to what some of the design elements of the projects were.

These are buildings that most people don't see or don't see beyond the front wall, they don't really have the opportunity to go into the building or through the building so I try to basically focus my  presentations on giving the viewer a chance to look behind the doors and see what goes on in the building.

It's the same with the fire stations, - a lot of people will see the fire stations from the outside, but very few people will have the opportunity or need to go into a fire station.

Everyone who has presented has always gotten a lot of applause and appreciation for just getting up there and doing the presentation. 

Sometimes if a presenter runs out of things to say someone in the audience will recognize that they're stuck and they'll come and ask a question - you know that's just good showmanship.

Dennis Dong is an architect with Calpo Hom & Dong Architects.

The photos above are slides from previous presentations by Dennis Dong at PK Night.

Did this interview answer all of your questions about Pecha Kucha Night? Do you plan on attending the event on November 6th? What kind of presenters do you think would be especially interesting to see at PK Night? Do you think Dennis Dong should write more about his experiences at PK Night or other areas of interest? Please comment below.