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.

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386- Their Dark Materials

01.22.2020

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 ...

99% Invisible episodes:

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 ...
11.13.2019 378- Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little campfire to indicate that something is flammable. Those icons are pretty obvious, but there ...
11.05.2019 377- How To Pick A Pepper The chili pepper is the pride of New Mexico, but they have a problem with their beloved crop. There just aren’t enough workers to pick the peppers. Picking chili peppers can be especially grueling work even compared to other crops. ...
10.30.2019 376- Great Bitter Lake Association A little-known bit of world history about a rag tag group of sailors stranded for years in the Suez Canal at the center of a war. Great Bitter Lake Association
10.23.2019 375- Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim Museum, you probably recognize it. From the outside, ...
10.15.2019 374- Unsure Footing Before 1992, the easiest way to run the time off the clock in a soccer game was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper, who could pick the ball up, and hold it for a few seconds before throwing ...
10.08.2019 373- The Kirkbride Plan Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ago they weren't seen as scary at all. Many of them were built part ...
10.01.2019 372- The Help-Yourself City There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.” Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.” Informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn’t through city planning or some kind of official process. If you’ve ...
09.24.2019 99% Invisible presents What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that the news cycle coming out of Washington DC has been very intense for anyone who ...
09.18.2019 371- Dead Cars Everything in Bethel, Alaska comes in by cargo plane or barge, and even when something stops working, it’s often too expensive and too inconvenient to get it out again. So junk accumulates. Diane McEachern has been a resident of Bethel ...
09.10.2019 370- The Pool and the Stream Redux This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern California and landscape architecture in Northern California, and then the world. A documentary ...
09.04.2019 369- Wait Wait...Tell Me! Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can completely change whether a five minute wait feels reasonable or completely unbearable. Transparency ...
08.28.2019 368- All Rings Considered Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really said something about you. These simple, 15 second melodies were disposable, yet highly personal trinkets. ...
08.21.2019 367- Peace Lines There are many walls in Belfast which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Some are fences that you can see through, while others are made of bricks and steel. Many have clearly been reinforced over time: a cinderblock wall ...
08.13.2019 366- Model City During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of San Francisco. This Works Progress Administration (WPA) project was conceived as a way ...
08.06.2019 365- On Beeing Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples and the like. Yet it’s only in the last 30 years that pollination services have become such an ...
07.31.2019 364- He's Still Neutral When confronted with trash piling up on a median in front of their home in Oakland, Dan and Lu Stevenson decided to try something unusual: they would install a statue of the Buddha to watch over the place. When asked ...
07.23.2019 363- Invisible Women Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado Perez is the author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, a ...
07.17.2019 362- Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for decades: the world's largest ball of twine. Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine
07.09.2019 361- Built on Sand Sand is so tiny and ubiquitous that it's easy to take for granted. But in his book The World in a Grain, author Vince Beiser traces the history of sand, exploring how it fundamentally shaped the world as we know ...
07.02.2019 360- The Universal Page Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s where Andrew edited essays and interviews, laid out articles, and was trained to take as much ...
06.25.2019 359- Life and Death in Singapore When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant concrete skyscrapers. In 1960, they formed the Housing and Development Board, or HDB, and just five years later they ...
06.18.2019 358- The Anthropocene Reviewed The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green rates different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. This week 99% Invisible ...
06.11.2019 357- The Barney Design redux All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our hometown team here at 99pi, we've been following these NBA finals for another design-related reason. ...
06.04.2019 356- The Automat The inside of a Horn & Hardart Automat looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria -- but instead of a human handing you hot food over a counter, you would push your tray up to a wall of little glass cubbies. ...
05.28.2019 355- Depave Paradise Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city began piping water in from far away as well as from aquifer below ground, creating ...
05.24.2019 Sound and Health: Hospitals Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals. According to Joel Beckerman, sound designer and composer at Man Made Music: "Hospitals are horrible places to get better." ...
05.21.2019 281- La Sagrada Familia There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing that sets it ...
05.17.2019 Sound and Health: Cities Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impacts on our mental and physical health. This ...
05.14.2019 354- Weeding is Fundamental Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding. When the main branch ...
05.07.2019 353- From Bombay with Love From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had completely different politics, languages, and cultures. But for a brief time, these two nations found ...
05.01.2019 352- Uptown Squirrel This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions around the globe. ...
04.24.2019 351- Play Mountain Even if you don't recognize a Noguchi table by name, you've definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer or art dealer is really sophisticated, they put a Noguchi table in their ...
04.16.2019 350- The Roman Mars Mazda Virus Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive certain models of Mazda. You can find all the fake podcast episodes and feeds on the Reply ...
04.09.2019 349- Froebel's Gifts In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence ...
04.02.2019 348- Three Things That Made the Modern Economy 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching consequences. This week, 99% Invisible is featuring three episodes that explain how the s-bend pipe revolutionized ...
03.27.2019 347- The Many Deaths of a Painting When Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was placed in the Stedelijk museum it was meant to be provocative, but one reaction that it received was so intense, so violent, it set off a chain ...
03.19.2019 346- Palaces for the People Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it's often harder to see. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures ...
03.12.2019 345- Classic Cartoon Sound Effects! Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades ago. How were these legendary sounds made and how have they stood the test of time? ...
03.06.2019 344- The Known Unknown The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential monuments. When President Reagan added the remains of an unknown serviceman who died in combat ...
02.26.2019 343- Usonia Redux Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known works, Wright created a small and inexpensive yet beautiful house. This modest home would go on to ...

Older episodes

99% Invisible

What's 99% Invisible about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

99% Invisible episodes:

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

378- Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness

377- How To Pick A Pepper

376- Great Bitter Lake Association

375- Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece

374- Unsure Footing

373- The Kirkbride Plan

372- The Help-Yourself City

99% Invisible presents What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law

371- Dead Cars

370- The Pool and the Stream Redux

369- Wait Wait...Tell Me!

368- All Rings Considered

367- Peace Lines

366- Model City

365- On Beeing

364- He's Still Neutral

363- Invisible Women

362- Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine

361- Built on Sand

360- The Universal Page

359- Life and Death in Singapore

358- The Anthropocene Reviewed

357- The Barney Design redux

356- The Automat

355- Depave Paradise

Sound and Health: Hospitals

281- La Sagrada Familia

Sound and Health: Cities

354- Weeding is Fundamental

353- From Bombay with Love

352- Uptown Squirrel

351- Play Mountain

350- The Roman Mars Mazda Virus

349- Froebel's Gifts

348- Three Things That Made the Modern Economy

347- The Many Deaths of a Painting

346- Palaces for the People

345- Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!

344- The Known Unknown

343- Usonia Redux

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