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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405- Freedom House Ambulanc...

07.08.2020

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 ...

99% Invisible episodes:

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 ...
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 ...

Older episodes

99% Invisible

What's 99% Invisible about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

99% Invisible episodes:

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

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

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