99% Invisible

By Roman Mars

Arts Design

What's 99% Invisible about?

Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. From award winning producer Roman Mars. Learn more at 99percentinvisible.org.
A proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.

4.8

21,557 ratings

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

419- Take a Walk

10.27.2020

During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is walking. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to ...

99% Invisible episodes:

10.27.2020 419- Take a Walk During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is walking. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to ...
10.23.2020 99pi Presents The Next Billion Users This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And everyone – no matter where they live, what language they speak or their level of digital ...
10.20.2020 418- Sign Stealing In the early days of baseball, sign-stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse of what the catcher was signaling to the pitcher. Even with this ...
10.13.2020 417- For the Love of Peat When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain five times more carbon than forests. But back in the 80s, most people didn't know this remarkable ...
10.06.2020 416- Exploring The 99% Invisible City We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City book by host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt with a guided audio tour of beautiful downtown Oakland, California. In this episode, we explain how anchor plates help hold ...
09.29.2020 415- Goodnight Nobody The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Nobody Pre-order The 99% Invisible City
09.22.2020 414- The Address Book An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What ...
09.15.2020 413- Highways 101 Icons and symbols and signage are all around us, and nowhere more so than on the open road. So for this episode of Ubiquitous Icons: hop in the car with Roman and Kurt for a crash course in roadside signage. ...
09.09.2020 412- Where Do We Go From Here? There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that panic has often been… public bathrooms. The debate about trans bathroom access became a big ...
09.01.2020 411- Podcast Episode After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’t have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg’s. Consumers wanted cheaper food. In response, supermarkets had to ...
08.25.2020 244- The Revolutionary Post Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a letter. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people under one ...
08.11.2020 410- Policing the Open Road Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers’ authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The ...
08.04.2020 409- California Love Scared Straight Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related crimes. In this episode, Walter, through a chance encounter, checks-in with his friend who went through the program with him, ...
07.29.2020 408- Valley of the Fallen About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It’s so big you can see it from miles away. Beneath the cross, there’s a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved ...
07.21.2020 407- The Dolphin that Roared When Emily Oberman found a flag of the island nation of Anguilla her father had helped design in her attic, she had no idea it was connected to one of the strangest political revolutions in history. The Dolphin that Roared ...
07.14.2020 406- A Side of Franchise There are many books about McDonald’s that criticize the company for its many sins, and author Marcia Chatelain has read all of them. But her book comes at this famous fast-food restaurant from a different angle and with a much ...
07.08.2020 405- Freedom House Ambulance Service One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were working desperately to save a dying patient. Maybe today he wouldn’t bat an eye at this ...
06.30.2020 404- Return of Oñate's Foot All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests against police brutality. Sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, these demonstrations have spread to communities, ...
06.24.2020 403- Return of the Yokai In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists' offices, even prisons. There are ...
06.16.2020 402- Instant Gramification If you’re on Instagram, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of one particular building called the Yardhouse. It was designed by the London-based architecture collective Assemble. The design of the building had a lot to say about creating ...
06.09.2020 Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12 A wedding was once seen as a start of young adulthood. Now, a wedding has come to represent a crowning achievement -- a symbol that your whole life is together and you have accrued the time and space and resources ...
05.29.2020 Diamonds: Articles of Interest #11 Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks actually worth? The ethics and costs of diamond rings have shifted with society, from their artificial scarcity ...
05.26.2020 Suits: Articles of Interest #10 Menswear can seem boring. If you look at any award show, most of the men are dressed in black pants and black jackets. This uniform design can be traced back to American Revolution, classical statuary, and one particular bloke bopping ...
05.19.2020 Perfume: Articles of Interest #9 The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't judge a scent solely by the brand and shape of the bottle. With the right amount of ...
05.15.2020 Knockoffs: Articles of Interest #8 Brands hold immense sway over both consumers and the American legal system. Few know this as well as Dapper Dan, who went from street hustler to fashion impresario and has spent time on both sides of American trademark law. Articles ...
05.12.2020 A Fantasy of Fashion: Articles of Interest #7 In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion dolls. It might seem like an odd thing to fund, but the fantasy of high fashion inspired ...
05.06.2020 401- The Natural Experiment In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running experiments have been interrupted. But there are some researchers for whom the shutdowns have provided a unique opportunity—a whole ...
04.29.2020 400- The Smell of Concrete After Rain There have been over 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. All have been tragic, but there are two people in particular we’ve lost due to COVID that were part of the world of architecture and design that ...
04.21.2020 399- Masking for a Friend Here in the US, we're not used to needing to cover half of our faces in public, but if you look at the other side of the world, it's a different story. In parts of Asia, wearing a mask in ...
04.14.2020 398- Unsheltered in Place 99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle had already been working on a series about unhoused people in the Bay Area for over a year when the current pandemic began to unfold. Suddenly, this vulnerable demographic was cast into the spotlight due ...
04.07.2020 397- Wipe Out If you have tried to buy toilet paper in the last few weeks, you might have found yourself staring at an empty aisle in the grocery store, wondering where all the toilet paper has gone. Although it may seem like ...
03.31.2020 396- This Day in Esoteric Political History In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political historian Nicole Hemmer, and special guests rescue moments from U.S. history to map our journey through a tumultuous year. ...
03.25.2020 395- This is Chance! Redux It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second-biggest earthquake ever measured at the time had hit Anchorage, Alaska. Some houses had been turned completely upside down while others had skidded into the ...
03.17.2020 394- Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects Buy Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are and all Beauty Pill records on Bandcamp or wherever you ...
03.11.2020 393- Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital The only truly accurate map of the world would be a map the size of the world. So if you want a map to be useful, something you can hold in your hands, you have to start making choices. We ...
03.03.2020 392- The Weather Machine The weather can be a simple word or loaded with meaning depending on the context -- a humdrum subject of everyday small talk or a stark climactic reality full of existential associations with serious disasters. In his book The Weather ...
02.26.2020 391- Over the Road At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and exchange stories, tips and gripes. One thing unites most in attendance this year: concerns about the steady ...
02.19.2020 390- Fraktur If you have ever caught even one minute of the history channel, you have seen fraktur. You’ve seen the font on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi roadwork signs. Today in Germany, blackletter typefaces are frequently used by ...
02.12.2020 389- Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out The story of how “Who Let The Dogs Out” ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever ...
02.05.2020 388- Missing the Bus If you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change, you might think about driverless cars, or hyperloops or any of the other ...
01.28.2020 387- The Worst Video Game Ever Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the ...
01.22.2020 386- Their Dark Materials Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. If it looks unreal because Vantablack isn’t actually a ...
01.15.2020 385- Shade Journalist Sam Bloch used to live in Los Angeles. And while lots of people move to LA for the sun and the hot temperatures, Bloch noticed a real dark side to this idyllic weather: in many neighborhoods of the city, ...
01.07.2020 384- Mini-Stories: Volume 8 This is part 2 of the 2019- 2020 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world that don’t quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason but they are cool 99pi ...
12.19.2019 383- Mini-Stories: Volume 7 It’s the end of the year and time for our annual mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that came up in our research for another episode...or maybe it was some cool thing someone told us about that we ...
12.15.2019 Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Everyone should listen to My Brother, My Brother, and Me on the Max Fun Network.
12.11.2019 382- The ELIZA Effect Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It was a simple chatbot named ELIZA that could interact with users in a typed ...
12.03.2019 381- The Infantorium “Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and amusement parks rather than hospitals,” explains Lauren Rabinowitz, an amusement park historian. If you wanted ...
11.27.2019 380- Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of mannequin that was sleek, simple, but conveyed style and personality. As a marketing stunt, he took ...
11.19.2019 379- Cautionary Tales Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more likely. His basic lesson has been ignored in nuclear power plants, financial markets and at the ...

Older episodes

99% Invisible

What's 99% Invisible about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

99% Invisible episodes:

419- Take a Walk

99pi Presents The Next Billion Users

418- Sign Stealing

417- For the Love of Peat

416- Exploring The 99% Invisible City

415- Goodnight Nobody

414- The Address Book

413- Highways 101

412- Where Do We Go From Here?

411- Podcast Episode

244- The Revolutionary Post

410- Policing the Open Road

409- California Love Scared Straight

408- Valley of the Fallen

407- The Dolphin that Roared

406- A Side of Franchise

405- Freedom House Ambulance Service

404- Return of Oñate's Foot

403- Return of the Yokai

402- Instant Gramification

Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12

Diamonds: Articles of Interest #11

Suits: Articles of Interest #10

Perfume: Articles of Interest #9

Knockoffs: Articles of Interest #8

A Fantasy of Fashion: Articles of Interest #7

401- The Natural Experiment

400- The Smell of Concrete After Rain

399- Masking for a Friend

398- Unsheltered in Place

397- Wipe Out

396- This Day in Esoteric Political History

395- This is Chance! Redux

394- Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are

393- Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital

392- The Weather Machine

391- Over the Road

390- Fraktur

389- Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out

388- Missing the Bus

387- The Worst Video Game Ever

386- Their Dark Materials

385- Shade

384- Mini-Stories: Volume 8

383- Mini-Stories: Volume 7

Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect

382- The ELIZA Effect

381- The Infantorium

380- Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl

379- Cautionary Tales

Other shows like 99% Invisible: