Last night I attended the largest Multi-Story lecture I have ever.

Multistory (notice the misspelling on the ‘storey’ part, to suggest multiple stories, very clever, hey?) is a lecture / talk series that UCA, the University for Creative Arts, has been organising for years, since before UCA was even called UCA (previous iterations have included UCCA (the other ‘C’ stood for College – nobody liked that) and KIAD (Kent Institute of Art and Design). They get all kinds of inspirational speakers down to little old Canterbury, from the art and architecture realms, to try and smack some thought and ideas into us dithering students.

This particular event was held at the quirky Doodle Bar, somewhere behind the endless looming backside of Foster’s Albion Riverside donut that sits with its bitten-off side facing the Thames, no doubt where its other half got soggy from too much dunking and fell in. Will Alsop, who introduced the guest speaker after a quick shout out to enliven the Canterbury crowd (“Canterbury is a wonderful place, and a secret place. Those of you who have not been should make your way down there”) is a guest lecturer at UCA and, I was told, has his studio somewhere within the immediate proximity of the bar. How very convenient.

Some funky lighting in the run-down-looking shed, housing The Doodle Bar amongst other interesting establishments.

And as for the guest speaker, who this brief piece is about. Thomas Heatherwick had managed to draw in a crowd of hundreds, filling a huge event space of a few hundred seats and many more standing in the wings (where none could hear a thing, I was told). Those who could hear were not disappointed.

His talk was simply a continuous presentation, rattling through seven of his more prominent works. Most were very familiar to the vast majority of the crowd, and we could have read about them in his book, Making, (A fantastic, enormous picture book packed full of inspiration).

But this is not what made this particular event so successful. Heatherwick must have explained these projects a million times over by now, but delivers his presentation with the energy and enthusiasm of a school boy showing off his hand-paintings to his parents. He explained each project from concept through to completion, with accurate descriptions of each stage of the project, or moments of inspiration, simplified into beautifully concise diagrams or images.

For two hours, I was fully enraptured in a series of projects I already knew a lot about. But it is not just the energetic performance (and it is a performance) that holds your attention; the most important attribute that this softly spoken man applies is a subtle sense of humour. Simple little, inoffensive anecdotes which break up the typical design talk which often comes across as tedious and self-gratifying, without humour to help break it up.

He described how as we as a society drift away from faith in religion we seem to need to find other faiths, exemplified by hedge fund managers who “all seem to be really in to their modern art”. He said that his studio chose not to use gold, silver of bronze for the material of the 2012 Olympic torch as they imagined those materials “would be a bit busy, at the time”. He revealed that the material cladding the controversial garden bridge was chosen to show that the bridge was not biased towards north of south of the river, he told anecdotes of trips to nudist beaches and surveyors stumbling across a couple having sex outside Temple Underground station, and exhibited a series of “selfies” sent in by foreign sports ambassadors, grinning (or adamantly not grinning, in some cases) beside globally dispersed pieces of the Olympic torch.

We (potentially a British stereotype) rely so much on comedy to encourage other emotions, (used so successfully in rom-coms, which) and here Heatherwick is an expert in applying comedy to intensify the level of awe. People ‘ooh’d and ‘ahh’d at visualisations and wide-angle photos, which I feel they were further engaged in because they had been laughing seconds earlier.

This was a fantastic learning experience for someone already in practice. The designs that Thomas Heatherwick rolls out, one after the other, can be accused of being ‘weird’, or ‘offensive’ or ‘out-of-context’, but they are always fascinating, and so well thought out. This lecture was a shining example of how to get an audience to engage in your idea, to make the thought process simple and accessible for everyone, and then let the final products speak for themselves. I found myself looking at the Garden bridge in a new light, from the loving, caring perspective of its creator, to the point where I was almost swayed into approving of its proposition (hey, Heatherwick can’t be blamed for its financing, necessity-lacking, crowd-banning and inevitable privatisation, can he?)

So, what have I learnt? That being funny can be a good thing, as long as your comedy is confidently and inoffensively delivered in order to enhance your main points. Oh, and as long as your designs are awesome.