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.

687 episodes transcribed
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564- Mini-Stories: Volume 17

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short stories ab...

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563- Empire of the Sum

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and the...

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561- Long Strange Tape

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and e...

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560- Home on the Range

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local elemen...

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559- The Six-Week Cure

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages.  The city became known as t...

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558- The Fever Tree Hunt

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent an...

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557- Model Village

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized envir...

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328- Devolutionary Redesign

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of on...

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555- The Big Dig

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway...

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554- Devil in the Details

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of h...

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552- Blood in the Machine

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When he wrote a...

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551- Office Space

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom loop.’ Converti...

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550- Melanie Speaks

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.The way a person's voice changes ove...

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549- Trail Mix: Track Two

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the first episode y...