Shows / 99% Invisible
99% Invisible
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.
Episodes
- 99% Invisible
The Magic Bureaucrat
In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Congress undertook a reform effort to redesign the welfare system from one that many believed trapped people in a cycle…
- 99% Invisible
Combat Hearing Loss
The US military buys a lot of foam ear plugs. Visit any base and you’ll find them under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms of washing machines…
- 99% Invisible
America’s Last Top Model
In 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a scale model that could test flooding in all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River. It…
- 99% Invisible
The Mind of an Architect
In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly creative scientists…
- 99% Invisible
Unpleasant Design
Benches in parks, train stations, bus shelters and other public places are meant to offer seating, but only for a limited duration. Many elements of such seats…
- 99% Invisible
Remembering Stonewall
It started with a place called the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars had been raided by police for decades. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people had been…
- 99% Invisible
Home on Lagrange
In 1968, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind’s greatest problems—issues like…
- 99% Invisible
The Blazer Experiment
In 1968, the police department in Menlo Park, California hired a new police chief. His name was Victor Cizanckas and his main goal was to reform the…
- 99% Invisible
H-Day
September 3rd, 1967, also known as H-Day, is etched in the collective memory of Sweden. That morning, millions of Swedes switched from driving on the left side…
- 99% Invisible
Holdout (Repeat)
Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all over the…
- 99% Invisible
Loud and Clear
Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and…
- 99% Invisible
Separation Anxiety
“Für Elise” is one of the world’s most widely-recognized pieces of music. The Beethoven melody has been played by pianists the world over, and its…
- 99% Invisible
Turf Wars of East New York
Neighborhoods are constantly changing, but it tends to be the people with money and power who get to decide the shape of things to come. New York City has an…
- 99% Invisible
The Grand Dame of Broad Street
The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The building…
- 99% Invisible
Unseen City
Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species. Walking down a…
- 99% Invisible
Supertall 101
Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of the small island of…
- 99% Invisible
Vox Ex Machina
In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.” It looked sort…
- 99% Invisible
Soul City
In the late 1960s, a civil rights leader named Floyd B. McKissick, at one time the head of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) proposed an idea for a new…
- 99% Invisible
The White Elephant Of Tel Aviv
Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning Shabbat schedules. One…
- 99% Invisible
Flying Food
The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on camera. It’s static…
- 99% Invisible
The SoHo Effect
In San Francisco, the area South of Market Street is called SoMa. The part of town North of the Panhandle is known as NoPa. Around the intersection of North…
- 99% Invisible
The Giftschrank
Centuries ago, Germany came up with a way to keep books that contained “dangerous” information without releasing them to the general public: The Giftschrank…
- 99% Invisible
Mojave Phone Booth
Situated in the middle of the Mojave desert, over a dozen miles from the nearest pavement, a lone phone booth sat along a dirt road, just waiting to become an…
- 99% Invisible
Video- The Norman Door with Vox
There is an epidemic of terrible doors in the world. But when Don Norman got frustrated with them, he ended up changing the way people everywhere think about…
- 99% Invisible
The Green Book
The middle of the 20th Century was a golden age for road travel in the United States. Cars had become cheap and spacious enough to carry families comfortably…
- 99% Invisible
Miss Manhattan
All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She has gone by many…
- 99% Invisible
The Yin and Yang of Basketball
In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the height of the…
- 99% Invisible
The Ice King
In the mid-19th century, decades before home refrigeration became the norm, you could find ice clinking in glasses from India to the Caribbean, thanks to a…
- 99% Invisible
Fish Cannon
The Iron Curtain was an 8,000-mile border separating East from West during the Cold War. Something unexpected evolved in the “no man’s land” that the massive…
- 99% Invisible
The Fresno Drop
In September 1958, Bank of America began an experiment – one that would have far reaching effects on our lives and on the economy. They decided after careful…
- 99% Invisible
Best Enjoyed By
Date labels (e.g. “use-by”, “sell-by”, “best-by”, “best if used by,” “expires on”, etc.) are on a lot of products. Forty-one states require a date label on at…
- 99% Invisible
Bone Music
In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and acquiring the scarce…
- 99% Invisible
Tube Benders
The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more brightly than the…
- 99% Invisible
Pagodas and Dragon Gates
For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, the…
- 99% Invisible
Worst Smell in the World
Many material trifles, such as Silly Putty, started as attempts at serious inventions, but in rare cases, the process works in reverse: something developed as…
- 99% Invisible
Fixing the Hobo Suit
Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume designers are learning new…
- 99% Invisible
The Landlord’s Game
From rock-paper-scissors, to tennis, to Mario Kart, every game is a designed system and all games are grounded in the same design principles. One popular game…
- 99% Invisible
Fountain Drinks
On April 21st, 1859, an incredible thing happened in London and thousands of people came out to celebrate it. Women wore their finest clothing. Men were in…
- 99% Invisible
Butterfly Effects
Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good ballot design is mainly…
- 99% Invisible
War and Pizza
Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenience. These…
- 99% Invisible
Atmospherians
The phrase ‘from Central Casting’ has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a stereotype or archetype, a subject so visually suited to its part it appears to…
99% InvisibleStructural Integrity (Rebroadcast)
When the (0:43) 601 Lexington / Citicorp Tower was completed in 1977, the 59-story skyscraper had a potentially fatal flaw that could have caused it to…
- 99% Invisible
Rajneeshpuram
Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,000 acres of muddy…
- 99% Invisible
Dead Letter Office
When something is lost in the mail, it feels like it has disappeared into the ether, like it was sucked into a black hole, like it no longer exists. But, it…
- 99% Invisible
A Sweet Surprise Awaits You
On the night of March 30, 2005, the Powerball jackpot was 25 million dollars. The grand prize winner was in Tennessee, but all over the United States, one…
- 99% Invisible
Milk Carton Kids
On a Sunday morning in 1982, in Des Moines, Iowa, Johnny Gosch left his house to begin his usual paper route. A short time later, his parents were awakened by…
- 99% Invisible
Reefer Madness
There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the products you see…
- 99% Invisible
Bathysphere
In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world of possibilities far…
- 99% Invisible
The Great Restoration
Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has been a castle on…
- 99% Invisible
Lawn Order
In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals have been deputized…
- 99% Invisible
Hard to Love a Brute
No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who turned cat-stroking…
- 99% Invisible
The Sunshine Hotel
The Bowery, in lower Manhattan, is one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods. It’s been through a lot of iterations. In the 1650s, a handful of freed slaves were…
- 99% Invisible
From the Sea, Freedom
In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state. The resulting treaty…
- 99% Invisible
Awareness
By the late 1980s, AIDS had been in the United States for almost a decade. AIDS had be the number one killer of young men in New York City, then of young men…
- 99% Invisible
On Location
So many classic movies have been made in downtown Los Angeles. Though many don’t actually take place in downtown Los Angeles. L.A. has played almost every city…
- 99% Invisible
Johnnycab (Automation Paradox, Pt. 2)
More than 90% of all automobile accidents are all attributable to human error, for some car industry people, a fully-automated car is a kind of holy grail…
- 99% Invisible
Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)
On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers, three pilots, and nine flight attendants boarded an Airbus 330 in Rio de Janeiro. This flight, Air France 447…
- 99% Invisible
Freud’s Couch
Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice and popular culture…
- 99% Invisible
All In Your Head
People who make horror movies know: if you want to scare someone, use scary music. Some of the most creative use of music and sound to evoke fear and anxiety…
- 99% Invisible
Voices in the Wire
This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and the Kitchen…