Paul Hughes is an Irish Designer (also a TEDx speaker) based in Amsterdam, who focuses on design thinking. He’s given about 200 talks around the world, all on the basis of writing on a ten meter roll of paper as he speaks.

Why is this relevant to you? Mr. Hughes, with the invitation of HBKU’s Campus Life Student Coordinators, was here in Education City to give one of his rather inspirational talks, with hopefully more to come in the area.

Students and staff members from around the HBKU institutions came together on short notice to watch Mr. Hughes speak, his starting sentence was ‘I’m Irish, and so I’m going to do this by telling you stories.’

And he did just that, with the audience rather unorthodoxly gathered around a table, instead of watching him speak on stage. Throughout his talk, he would write on the ten meter roll while speaking, with illustrations and key words echoing his main points through his lecture.

A true feat about Mr. Hughes is the fact that the talk felt incredibly dynamic – he would mold and adjust his content according to the context of the audience right on the spot. He also engaged participants by asking them to draw with him on his paper and then used the audiences’ ideas to clearly explain to them, his own point.

He told stories that he was able to make relevant to the audience that focused on new alternative design approaches to interconnectivity, leadership, innovation, communication and action and our impact on a global and local scale. He used examples that range from basic chemistry experiments and molecules, all the way to Tao’s philosophy of space having meaning. This also included business examples and mentions of Edward De Bono’s visionary approach to problems.

In other words, Mr. Hughes Lecture is appropriately not a lecture, but a brilliant performance whose key points are memorable and deeply motivating.

Why is this relevant to you, again? The next time you see a poster on Paul Hughes giving a talk or a workshop in HBKU, be sure to attend for an incredible experience.

You can also look at his Tedx Talk on this link for a similar idea of how the talk transpired, titled Ten Meters of Thinking: The ABC of Communication:Paul Hughes at TEDxInnsbruck.

You should also watch out for Jayati Desai and Ahmed Raza Hashmi’s events as HBKU’s Campus Life Student Coordinators. They’ve started a series of programs designed to give students, faculty and staff a well rounded experience of Education City and encourage dialogue among the community, including their regular Thought Provoking Tuesday events.