Imagine you’re working for a big company. Like, say, number 7 on the Fortune 500 list. Oh, and it’s around the year 2000. No Facebook. No Gmail. We’re not thinking much about privacy. And then the company you work for goes bust in spectacular fashion. And then some regulator in W … | Continue reading
Many animals that have learned to live amidst humans benefit from their proximity, but sometimes that relationship goes both ways, as in the case of barn owls that provide a service to their mammalian neighbors. Indeed, there is a long tradition of building “owl holes” to encoura … | Continue reading
Urban reuse is as old as cities. Wherever there has been long-term human habitation, there has been spolia, Latin for “spoils,” as in “the spoils of war.” Historically, the term has mostly been used to refer to stone or other masonry that has been taken from one demolished struct … | Continue reading
The first time that David Bohnett heard about the internet, he knew that this was going to be a technology that was about to change the world. Today, David is a philanthropist and tech entrepreneur, but back in the early 1990s he really wanted to get on the ground floor of this b … | Continue reading
The first time that David Bohnett heard about the internet, he knew that this was going to be a technology that was about to change the world. Today, David is a philanthropist and tech entrepreneur, but back in the early 1990s he really wanted to get on the ground floor of this b … | Continue reading
In many countries, left-handed people are at least acknowledged, if not equally considered in everyday design. In some places, though, official data seems to reflect an unlikely reality — for instance, when a country reports left-handers as representing just a few percent of the … | Continue reading
As 99% Invisible celebrates its 10th anniversary, we’re revisiting a decade of fan favorites and greatest hits. These episodes highlight different eras, topics, and a range of creative storytellers. If you’re new to 99pi or looking to share it with others, consider this a startin … | Continue reading
The Hong Kong skyline is pierced by gaping voids. Huge holes in the middle of tall towers seem to defy aesthetic or structural logic. And the reason for this unusual architectural choice? Dragons. Such “dragon gates” are designed to let these mythical flying beasts pass from thei … | Continue reading
When Pop Up Magazine thought about the kinds of stories they wanted to make for their Fall Issue, they knew they wanted to make things that were interactive. That compelled listeners to do something… anything, really. They realized there was one thing everyone on their team was d … | Continue reading
The urban grid of Salt Lake City, Utah is designed to tell you exactly where you are in relation to Temple Square, one of the holiest sites for Mormons. Addresses can read like sets of coordinates. “300 South 2100 East,” for example, means three blocks south and 21 blocks east of … | Continue reading
The popularity of “love locks” can be traced back to the story of a schoolteacher named Nada and an army officer named Relja in the small Serbian town of Vrnjacka Banja. The couple pledged their love to one another while standing on a local bridge before Relja went off to fight i … | Continue reading
Living in Germany, you notice a lot of small engineering innovations that make life easier, like omnidirectional wheels on shopping carts that actually work. One of these innovations in particular stands out, entirely ordinary to Germans, but extraordinary to visitors and newcome … | Continue reading
Designer Raphael Geroni spent some time talking with us about his work on The 99% Invisible City, especially its cover. It went through a lot of design iterations, starting with this first one shown below. In this interview, we’ll take you behind the scenes with insights from Rap … | Continue reading
There’s no clear consensus on who invented ‘I Voted’ stickers found in polling locations across the United States and sent out with mail-in ballots, but the first mentions of them go back to the early 1980s. A few people and groups have claimed credit for the very first sticker, … | Continue reading
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 literacy – deserves an internet that was made … | Continue reading
In an era of constant bad news about the climate crisis, it can be tough to find something to be optimistic about. So in 2019 when articles started circulating declaring that tree planting had “mind-blowing potential” combat climate change, a lot of people got excited. To be clea … | Continue reading
“It’s funny how many people accuse me of being mad or geeky – and then they send me photos or ask for more information!” writes Flash Bristow, founder of the Pylon Appreciation Society, which is dedicated to plotting, spotting, explaining and photographing power line pylons. For … | Continue reading
Many 99% Invisible stories are long and in-depth, featuring multiple characters and expansive arcs, but sometimes less is more. For fans who have listened to shorter classic episodes of the show or read The 99% Invisible City book, these should sound satisfyingly familiar: Episod … | Continue reading
The night was August 4, 2017, in Houston, Texas. The Toronto Blue Jays baseball team were losing to the hometown Astros, when they called in pitcher Mike Bolsinger. The Astros lineup that year was stacked, featuring star players like Alex Bregman and Carlos Beltran. When Bolsinge … | Continue reading
Full of ornate stonework, cemeteries can be beautiful spaces both to mourn the deceased and celebrate the lives of those who have passed. Yet there is more to these places than carvings of skulls, crosses and crossbones. A snapped rose branch, for instance, indicates a life ended … | Continue reading
In an era of constant bad news about the climate crisis, it can be tough to find something to be optimistic about. So in 2019 when articles started circulating declaring that tree planting had “mind-blowing potential” combat climate change, a lot of people got excited. To be clea … | Continue reading
It is hard to imagine something so playful rising out of such a time of turmoil, yet tens of thousands of miniature (or: peewee) golf courses emerged in cities during the Great Depression. In fact, conditions of that period helped drive this lesser-known recreational activity’s s … | Continue reading
In the northeastern United States, so-called “witch windows” are said to foil evil crones soaring on broomsticks. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Chinese “dragon gates” are designed not to block but rather encourage the passage of fantastical beasts, allowing them to freely … | Continue reading
Early on in the design process of The 99% Invisible City book, coauthors Roman and Kurt brainstormed ideas for covers that balanced illustration and typography, art and information. To get to the final design, though, was a journey. Along the way, we learned what to keep, what to … | Continue reading
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. Together, we dive into different everyday designs, using examples from the blocks around our of … | Continue reading
Flags are generally supposed to be simple and clean, while seals are allowed a bit more flexibility and complexity, at least up to a point. When a new seal for Independence County, Arkansas was announced back in August, it drew a lot of criticism. Commenters wondered at what look … | Continue reading
Good design is in the details, as they say, and great architectural design details are often site-specific, responding to local contexts and regional conditions. In places like the Pacific Northwest where rain is a defining factor of everyday life, designing for drainage is natur … | Continue reading
To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the New York Public Library, a list was published of the ten books that had been checked out the most in the history of the library — and most of these were children’s books, like The Cat in the Hat and Where the Wild Things Are. Curiously ab … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, a tiny radio show about design called 99% Invisible made its big debut. At first, longer episodes had to be edited down to fit into the broadcast clock, but over time, the podcast grew. 99pi now has more than 400,000,000 downloads to date, but with hundreds of epis … | Continue reading
Dadarao Bilhore was devastated to learn of his son’s death on the streets of his city, but he was also motivated to help save others from a similar fate. Prakash was just a teenager, riding a bike when he hit a particularly deep pothole (hidden by water during Mumbai’s summer mon … | Continue reading
Humans have been living in cities for a really long time, but like so many things about the past, getting around cities used to be needlessly difficult. This is because there weren’t reliable signs, or even street addresses. An address is something many people take for granted to … | Continue reading
From the outset, Kurt and Roman were worried less about hitting a target word count for The 99% Invisible City and more about going over it. Between Roman’s decade of storytelling at 99pi and Kurt’s architecture education and work on WebUrbanist, we had a lot of pent-up stories a … | Continue reading
They seem like marvels from another time, and for the most part they are: many mail chutes were made over a century ago and shuttered decades ago. Yet remarkably, hundreds of these vintage mail routing systems are still operational in cities from New York to Chicago. The majority … | Continue reading
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. We’ll learn about the history of the stop sign, the iconic rural mailbox … | Continue reading
In the decades since the Holocaust, the phrase “never forget” has became a mantra for remembering this immensely tragic chapter of history. Like the longer saying that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” it has become a call to action for people like German artist … | Continue reading
The latest episode of 99% Invisible details the history of and hopeful future for bathroom design. With a focus on the needs of trans and nonbinary people, Susan Stryker and the other members of a project called Stalled! have recently won a major victory in the International Buil … | Continue reading
Sandy Allen is a reporter and writer. They live in upstate New York and they often go into New York City to run errands and go to meetings. But when they go out, finding an accessible bathroom can be a challenge. For context, Sandy is nonbinary and transgender. In terms of lookin … | Continue reading
Born of necessity during the devastating spread of the Black Plague, these deceptively cute little openings were a product of their times, allowing people to purchase glasses or bottles of wine through small openings without interacting face-to-face with proprietors. Many such ex … | Continue reading
About a hundred years ago, we didn’t really have supermarkets. If you went shopping, you had to go to a greengrocer, and then to the butcher, then someone delivered your milk, and it was so, so time-consuming. But in 1916, a man named Clarence Saunders opened a store in Tennessee … | Continue reading
Looking at finished drawings in The 99% Invisible City, one could be forgiven for thinking that what appears on a page represents the size of a piece, which in some cases span multiple sheets of paper. Consider this double-page spread in the book by artist Patrick Vale, which spi … | Continue reading
The City Museum in St. Louis is both stranger and more impressive than its name might suggest, a retrofitted warehouse complex overflowing with interactive exhibits, novelty rooms, even a ten-story slide. Converted planes and recycled bus are just a few of its creatively reused c … | Continue reading
There are currently more than 31,000 post offices in the United States. Some are grand old ones that take up entire city blocks. Others are smaller—hidden away in the backs of general stores and in other odd places across rural America. And one of these smaller ones may be the mo … | Continue reading
Anyone who has listened to 99% Invisible likely knows that we have a long history with challenge coins, starting with an episode produced years ago about these curious collectibles — now we’re back with a brand new coin to go with your copy of The 99% Invisible City, available fo … | Continue reading
A design born of global disaster, the Laufmaschine (literally: running machine) was created in the wake of a war as well as a famine-fueling volcanic eruption. This pivotal innovation in wheeled transit was developed by Karl von Drais, a German inventor thinking on his feet about … | Continue reading
Available now on our store: a sleek face mask featuring the mythical Amabié, designed by our creative partners at MUCHMORE, produced by Ugmonk, with sales proceeds going to the charity Hate is a Virus. Episode 403 Return of the Yokai PlayPause Add to QueueRemove from Queue Downlo … | Continue reading
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 conversation. As he enlisted people to try it out, Weizenb … | Continue reading
On July 10th, 2015, a police officer in Prairie View Texas pulled over a 28-year-old black woman named Sandra Bland for not signaling before a turn. The traffic stop quickly turned hostile and there was a confrontation between the officer about her smoking in her car. Many people … | Continue reading
If you’re on Instagram there’s a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of this particular building called the Yardhouse. The Yardhouse was designed by the London-based architecture collective Assemble. The designers had just moved into their first studio in the Stratford neighborho … | Continue reading