99% Invisible - 263- You Should Do a Story

Episode Date: June 20, 2017

“You should do a story…” is the first line to a lot of the conversations you have when you work at 99pi. This week we look into a bunch of those stories suggested by our listeners and present them to … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So years ago I was talking to John Marr. He's the guy who first uttered this bedrock 99PI mantra. Always rate the plaque. And we were talking about the show and he said, you know what you should do a story about. It's one of my favorite places in San Francisco. So I went to the address and I checked it out. And I kid you not. He sent me to a gas station on Van S Avenue in San Francisco. He told me to look around and discover what was weird about it.

In almost every respect, it's a normal Chevron gas station. It has a blue awning and the red and blue Chevron logo on the sign, but the sign in awning don't say Chevron, they say, standard. As in standard oil, the massive oil monopoly broken up in the early 20th century by the Sherman Antitrust Act. One of the independent companies created by that breakup was Chevron, and for some reason, even though this gas station is a modern Chevron station in every way, it's called Standard. If you call the station, they will answer the phone,

saying Chevron, and the attendant cannot tell you why it's a standard on the side of Tride. But a trademark lawyer, like Amanda Levindowski, can. A trademark can be any word name symbol device used by someone who has the keyword here is bonafide intent to use the mark in commerce and they're using that word symbol device to identify the source of their goods or services. That phrase bonafide intent means that if you want to keep a trademark, you have to use it. In this particular case, when standard oil was busted up,

the standard oil trademark still retained a lot of goodwill and value. And if for whatever reason down the line, Chevron wants to take advantage of that value, the name standard has to be used. And it has to be used in connection with whatever the underlying goods or services are. So they couldn't just print pamphlets that occasionally used mixed Chevron standard branding

and say that they were still using it for oil and gas. They have to prominently use the standard name in conjunction with oil and gas services if they want to keep it. So that's why there's a standard gas station that for all intents and purposes operates as a chevron station in San Francisco and 15 other locations in the US.

This week, you should do a story for researching and presenting short design stories requested by our listeners and seeing where that path takes us. And in the spirit of the exercise, we're starting with what I think is the most requested design topic of all time. Here's our digital director Kurt Colstad talking with me about desire paths. And as the name suggests, desire paths are these unplanned routes, the people just really want to take.

And they're shaped by repeated use. And I think part of it is that they're found everywhere. You can just see them all over the place. And the most common type that you see are shortcuts, which are often just visible as rough dirt trails through, you know, grassy areas and cities. So most commonly when you think of a desir, you think of like, imagine a circuitous, or maybe like a 90 degree turn and a sidewalk, and then there's this like 45 degree dirt path

that cuts across and creates a shortcut. And that's the most common idea of what a desire path is. Those people wanna take the shortest path, but desire paths are not always a shortcut. In fact, sometimes they end up being a long cut. And this can happen for all kinds of reasons. And in some places, there are superstitions about walking under utility poles.

And so people end up taking this long way around, and you can see that marked in the dirt. Or when there's a slope going down to a crossover underneath a road, and normally, a biker would bike down that hill and then bike back up the other side. But often, there's like a way to just, you know, take the grass and go off to the side and it ends up being a longer path.

But, you know, if they don't have to go open down the hill. Right. So it's still like a shortcut in the sense of energy. Right. It'll take them less work ultimately. But it also, it's just kind of weird because it bows out to the side And that's not how we normally think of these things. We normally think of them. That's just like yeah, the short way across So these can be really frustrating as an urban planner because a lot of reason you design things the way you do is to use the built environment to shape the behavior you want

but Desire past can also be illuminating because They can really show a designer how to make their design work better for people. Right. Sometimes they frustrate the plans of urban planners and trail makers, but other times these people can actually evaluate the behaviors that people have naturally and use that to inform their designs. So, for example, college campuses have been known to map out a basic grid of sidewalks, but then leave some sidewalks unpaived and just sort of see where people walk to fill in the gaps. And then they come back in and they pave that based on the natural

behavior of those people walking. And in Finland, park planners have been known to watch and see where people walk after a big snow fall. So there's sort of a blank slate and people cross the park and they just trace their paths then use that to inform like a year-round pathway for that park. Oh, that's so cool. Which actually reminds me of my favorite form of snow-based desire path, the Sneckdown, which is this portmanteau of snowy and neck down, which is a neck down is actually kind of hard to picture.

It's like a part of the curb. Like if you can imagine like a straight street and then like a little bit of a bump out of the curb and extension of the curb is called a neck down. So how do the people use a snack down in particular? So like those finish park planners that are evaluating where people walk after snowfalls, urban planners can use snack downs to evaluate where cars walk after snowfalls, urban planners can use snack downs to evaluate where cars drive after a snowfall. And more specifically, they can look at where they don't drive.

So when the fresh snow covers the road, drivers tend to follow a narrower path, and then other cars follow in that narrower path, which leaves a lot of area actually untouched. And this results in what is effectively like a temporary curb extension and can also form sort of traffic islands in the middle of streets where cars just don't go.

But then did they ever take this information and like use it for other parts of the year when it isn't snowy? That's really the key is urban planners can evaluate where people don't go and use that information to advocate for curb extensions and traffic islands where they don't go and use that information to advocate for curb extensions and traffic islands where they don't it currently exist. And the argument is pretty straightforward. I mean, if the cars don't need to go there in the winter, why did they need to go there at all, right? Right. That's smart. I like it. It gives you a little sandbox to play in once the snow falls and all of sudden, you realize that you have this opportunity to replay in your city in these little tiny ways.

A lot of this analysis is really kind of lovely. It's like people go out and they take pictures and they make videos and then they trace over these places where the cars don't go and suddenly becomes very clear. The cars don't actually need that space. One of the reasons why desire paths and snack downs are so they resonate so much with audience and not because they're urban planners. It's because they're this great metaphor for design in general. Yes, and a lot of people use them in usability design and think about them in terms of interface design. So a really common tactic is to not just decide

we're gonna make this thing this way and people are gonna have to use it this way, but instead to actually look at how people are already using something, and then take that and give it a more official way to work. So, for example, on Twitter, you know, ads and hashtags, those weren't built in with Twitter, users of all those over time. And then Twitter originally said, oh, well, if users are using them, we're going to support this usage and, you know, evolve what they can do.

And never really thought about that, that ads and hashtags were basically desirpaths created by the user. Digital desirpaths. If you want to take a deeper dive into the hash mark, or octathorp is a vertical it, Avery Trollman did a whole episode about its origins, so if you turn your Himnales to episode number 145, you will find it. I'm going to be a little bit more focused on the story of the story. I'm going to be a little bit more focused on the story of the

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me about it and it was like about electrical current clocks and this time in Southern California when people had to make this big switch. I don't know. I didn't absorb that much of it at the time. But it did sound neat. It did kind of sound like a Bar Alley. So I went back. I started looking into it. And basically, the story starts back in the late 1800s when the Los Angeles area and sort of surrounding

to other towns in Southern California. We're starting to get their first power plants. And the main motivation at the time was to bring refrigeration to the citrus growers. So they could put oranges inside of refrigerators? Exactly, for cold orange juice. Of course. And so back in these early days of electricity,

there wasn't a national standard for like what frequency of current these power plants should deliver us. What is an electrical frequency really mean? and what are the options that they have to work with when it comes to electrical frequencies? Okay, now the part of the show where I explain electricity. No, I don't want to actually do the complete disservice of talking too much about the physics of electricity, but the way I understand it is that electricity

basically comes into our homes in waves of alternating current, and you can actually think of them like pulses. And the number of pulses per second is the frequency of the current. So if you're on a 50 cycle system or like a 50 hertz system, the pulses are coming at 50 a second and then 60 hertz would be 60 a second. And 50 and 60 are sort of the two most common frequencies. And why would you use one like instead of the other? Like what determines whether or not you're going to use one or the other? They're both fine. They both do all the things we need them to do. And you can deliver current at lots of different frequencies. But if you slow it down enough, like say, to 30 hertz, when you screw in a light bulb,

you apparently can actually perceive a sort of that pulsing and it sort of is perceived as like a flicker in the light bulb. So in the early 1900s, Southern California, so like Los Angeles, Burbank, Pasadena, they all start kind of getting on this like 50 Hertz system. And meanwhile, the rest of the country is getting on a 60 Hertz system for the most part. And there's like some exceptions.

Right. And so right now that's not that big a deal in the early 1900s, but eventually this grid is they're going to all meet up and that would not be good to have two different systems. Right. And so it starts to become a problem. And one of the things that becomes a problem is like manufacturers had to make different products for people in Southern California. Because anything with like an electrical motor that was designed to work on a 60 cycle system is not going to work as well on a 50 cycle system. And one of the things that definitely didn't work as well

was electric clocks. So if you had a clock that you got in New York City and then you moved to LA and you plug in your clock, it would actually lose 10 minutes every hour. Yeah. And that is because electric clocks actually use those pulses of current to keep track of the time You know some clocks have pendulums, but keeping track of those pulses of current is it is the way that electric clocks know what time it is

Or when to move the second hand And at that point electric clocks were really popular like a lot of people have them They're not quite as common anymore. So yeah, clocks were a problem. Other things with motors. And then in the 30s, California started to receive power from new dams, like the Hoover Dam. And this power was coming into California at the wrong frequency. And then the power companies would have to convert it. And the conversion process was difficult and expensive. So in 1936, the city of Los Angeles decided to switch all their customers to 60-cycle current and then in 1945, the Southern California Edison company decided to switch everyone else

in Southern California over to the 60-cycle current. And that must have been crazy because you're talking about every appliance that plugs into a wall. It is now like being run at a sub-optimal frequency and therefore you have to change everything along the way. Yeah, it was nuts. It was a huge undertaking. They weren't just like, okay, sorry, like throw out your stuff. They sent crews into people's homes to retrofit their washing machines. They sent people into factories to make sure all the machinery worked right. And it was hundreds of thousands of customers, like I think nearly a million customers. And then the power companies also had to change all their own equipment, all the electric meters.

The power companies also had to change all their own equipment, all the electric meters. And then for clocks, you could actually go and drop your clock off at something called a clock depot. And there were just like rows and rows and tables of clocks being worked on and sort of men sitting there working to make your clock work. That was a good old days. When you had this big infrastructure project and then everyone just got to work and made it work for everybody.

Yeah, I have no idea how many people they employed for this, but it sounds like quite a few. So by 1948, all of Southern California had switched to the new system. And the final tally was like 500,000 clocks and almost 400,000 lighting fixtures, 58,000 refrigerators. And if you think of how the population of LA exploded in the following years, it's so lucky that they decided to take this on when they did.

I mean, you couldn't possibly do it now. No, like no way. And that's sort of why you'll never see like an international standard for electrical current. So you may know if you've traveled to Europe that you have to buy like a little adapter, because most of Europe is still on a 50 cycle system. And they'll never change, because it would just be too much. It would just be too much. And I think the United States and Mexico

and most of like Central America, maybe South America are 60 cycle. And Japan is actually, I think, the only country that still uses two different frequencies in their one country. So basically, one half of the country has 50 hearts and the other half is using 60 hearts. Well, that must be such a pain. Yeah, it actually was a really big problem

after the Fukushima accident, because a big portion of the country lost power, there was a tsunami, and they were trying to send power from one part of the country to the other, which is a fairly common thing that we do, but they couldn't do it. You can convert from one frequency to another, but it's hard to do it in really big quantities.

And so every so often in Japan, actually, there'll be this little movement that bubbles up that's like, we should all be on the same frequency. And then it just like really quickly dies because like one side is like well, we're not gonna switch And the other side's like well, we're definitely not gonna switch either and then that's the end of that So it stays the same and so it stays the same and yeah, we just can think those early Pioneers and LA that were like let's go ahead and do this before things are just out of control. Yeah, thanks Those guys. And thanks to Jake Kennen for suggesting the story for us.

Yeah, thank you, Jake Kennen. And you talked to a couple other people that you want to thank. I talked to a whoreologist named Ken Rindell for this story. I thought the story was actually going to be more about clocks than it ended up being, so I learned all about how electro clocks work. Anyway, he was great. He held me in town. I asked him if he heard S-Town. He said no. Of course, I immediately sent him a link. And then I also talked to an electrical engineer named Darryl Heinrich, who was also really, really helpful. So for a long time Kurt Colstead has been obsessed with European style tilt and turn windows.

Really ever since he was a kid living in Biroit, Germany, I can't really explain them in audio, but they're really functional and worthy of his design obsession. So Kurt wrote about them recently on the website, and several readers shared and appreciated his design obsession, and to some, they were completely new. And then there was a bunch of Europeans who were just confused because they didn't understand

that these windows weren't already everywhere. Half the readers were astonished these things exist and wanted to have them, and the other half were shocked that anybody would think that they were shocking because they were totally ordinary everyday window designs for them. So this web article prompted a bunch of our audience to send in suggestions for other clever, regional design solutions that we should also do a story about. One of the things that somebody suggested right off the bat, which I was instantly fascinated

by, are these things called finished, disstrying closets. They're also known as disstrying cabinets. Okay, so I'm gonna try to pronounce it. It's Austion Kui Val Scapi. Austion Kui Val Scapi, that's what it's called. That's what it's called.

Austion Kui Val Scapi, I can't do it. Austion Kui Val Scapi. Yes. Okay,. Astion, Kooi Valskampi. Yes. Okay, so go ahead. So, the design has a pretty simple premise. If dishes can dry themselves in storage, there's no need to dry them manually. So instead of having a drying rack next year's sink, you put your dishes away in a cabinet above the sink, and this cabinet has special shelves with slots, so the waterfalls down

through each level. And it lands ultimately in the sink or on a slope surface which then drains into that sink. And as a nice sort of design byproduct, this ends up clearing up clutter in your kitchen, so you don't have this annoying, destroying rack that's always half full of dishes sitting next to your sink.

So your destroying rack is essentially the same cabinet you put your dishes away in. Exactly, it's a one step process. You just, you know, take the dishes, put them away, they drive themselves. I love it. It's so beautifully simple. They should do that everywhere. That's for sure. We should have those everywhere. So this regional design masterpiece was suggested by Anton Hegman. Now that he lives abroad, Anton says, I have to dry my dishes on a rack that sits on the counter like a barbarian. It's true Anton, I agree with you.

We are barbarians. So you wrote an article about that one, it was a huge hit, and then it caused people to send in other little regional design solutions. And suddenly I had a lot of regional design solutions to work with. And one of the first ones that came out was this Kotatsu table, which is a Japanese furnishing that doubles as a heating fixture. So a picture a really tall coffee table with a quilt over the sides that you put your legs under. And underneath these tables there's a small space heater. And this top layer of the table, it's a little hard picture,

but just like two panels sandwich this blanket. So you have a surface that you can set things on, but you also have this blanket, you know, or comfort or extending out on all sides. Instead of sitting around in an arc facing a fireplace, you can actually sit around in a circle and face each other and pull up sections of this cover and then sort of interact around this central heating element. Why is this a Japanese thing? So, these historically been really useful in Japan specifically because home insulation is often sparse and whole house heating can be difficult and expensive.

And then traditional Japanese clothing also lends itself especially well to this form of space heating because warm air can flow up through the folds of a spacious kimono and then out the neck and armholes. I mean, that's sort of what I like about it. It has a lot of very specific reasons that it comes out of Japan. Yeah. But a lot of those aren't necessary to it function either.

A lot of those things would work for really any place or culture. But the way that it's optimized for a kimono suggests that it didn't used to be electric heating elements underneath. No, historically, they came from a food cooking system that was in the floor. They had these charcoal burning food cookers on the floor, and this morphed into a system where they would try to use that to heat the home. And then eventually, you know, in the modern era, this sort of more dangerous prone to fire solution was replaced by an electrical heating system. Right. Cool.

What are those called again? Kotatsu tables. Kotatsu tables. So these would be great everywhere, as long as you didn't burn your legs. Is there any incidents that you read about anything about people burning their legs? Oh, yeah. Like, their advisory is to say, like, don't fall asleep under your Kotatsu table. Like, you can definitely, like, lead to injuries and things.

Yeah, that's not a perfect design. It's not a perfect design solution. It's not a perfect design solution, but you also just shouldn't sleep under tables in general, probably so. So, especially not hot tables. Especially not hot tables. So it's really important to use the catatonic table as described, but that is not like our next design solution,

which one of its powers is the versatility of this object. It's called the Hills Heist. The Hills Heist is effectively the opposite use case. It can be used for everything that it's not designed for. So we'll describe the Hills Heist. Basically, it's a rotating clothesline. It has a central metal pole that sticks up from the ground, like the trunk of a tree,

with smaller clothesline supports that branch out from the top. And then this thing sits in backyards and it spins slowly in the breeze, drying clothes on a series of lines that just sort of circle that central pole. And where is the hillswurst from? The hillshoast was developed in Australia

and pioneered by this guy in the 1940s who's coming back from the war and decided to basically build his own backyard rotary clothesline. And it wasn't the first of its kind, but his really took off. They became a commercial success, and now that company sells millions of the things every year. This is not just a thing for drying clothes in your backyard.

Like this is become an iconic design that's really tied to Australia. Yeah. One of our listeners wrote in with a really great, very detailed explanation of its role in Australian culture. And basically, as she explains it, it's this kind of critical fixture of the suburban Australian dream. You get this quarter acre lot with a beautiful backyard, and in your beautiful backyard, you have this hill's hoist.

And it's sort of an incomplete picture without that iconic thing. But unlike the single use case of the finished cabinet or even the Katatsu table, you see pictures of Hillshoy's being used as like things that kids hang on and spin around and pinyadas or whatever. Like anything that you can hang something and want to spin it, the Hillshoy's is the perfect solution for you. Yeah, and there's a great YouTube video out there of these guys who hooked up lines to the thing and a motor and have it spinning super fast and like there were whipping kids around

on a water slide on the ground. And if there's like a wedding or a holiday party, you decorate your Hills hoist. There's a drinking game where people hang bags of wine from the thing and spend those around. And one of the things I kind of love about it is that for like every stage of your life, there is some activity that you do, whether you're a kid who's swinging on the thing or somebody who's much older and sitting in the shade structure that you put on top of the

thing, like everybody has some use for this. Right. So if you combine the ubiquity of this object with boredom of sitting in your backyard, you will get some kind of creative solution for something. Yes. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's the thing.

It's this big thing, and it's there. And so, inevitably, people figure out new things to do with it. Besides hanging clothes. So, hats off to the hillswice. It's something special. And so inevitably people figure out new things to do with it besides, you know hanging close So that's off to the hills moist. It's something special Thanks to Alyssa Stevens for letting us know about the hills hoist If you want to see pictures of any of these or if you have a regional design solution from your home country or state We'd love to hear about it. You can reach us and 99pi dot org

about it. You can reach us at 99pi.org. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Kurt Colestead, Kitty Mingle, and me Roman Mars. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Terran Mazza, Sean Rial, Avery Troll from An Ancery, If You Sif. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI at work or on Instagram, Reddit,

and Tumblr too. But there's still a raging debate about the best way to depict a lane ending on a road sign at 99pi.org.