99% Invisible
By Roman Mars
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Podcast Description
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible (99 Percent Invisible) is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. From award winning producer Roman Mars and KALW in San Francisco. Learn more: http://99percentinvisible.org Awesome people saying nice things: "Roman Mars lights the radio. His pieces conjure other worlds, grapple with big ideas, make sound three dimensional. They are smart and funny and original. The Kitchen Sisters would like to be Presidents of his Fan Club. " -The Kitchen Sisters, NPR "Highly digging 99% Invisible. One of the best podcasts I've bumped into in a while." -Jad Abumrad, Radiolab "I love the show. It's wonderful. Actually reminded me of why I love radio." -Jonathan Goldstein, CBC's WireTap
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99% Invisible-47- US Postal Service Stamps | Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches, but you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make it work. -Ethel Kessler, Art Director for USPS Stamp Services Stamps design takes, on average, a year to a year and a half, from conception to execution. Unfortunately, most of the stamps we encounter on a day-to-day basis are the rather predictable flag, bell, and love stamps, but there are some really fantastic commemorative stamps, which are supremely functional and affordable tiny works of art. To determine what should go on a US stamp, the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee combs through nearly 50,000 suggestions per year offered by the general public. Once the subjects are chosen and approved by the Postmaster General, they are assigned to a handful of art directors to be designed. There are loads guidelines to help stamp subject selection, but one of the big rules recently changed. In 2012, the first living person will be commemorated on an official USPS stamp. Julie Shapiro, Artistic Director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival, produced this episode. Julie spoke with Terry McCaffrey, the retired manager of stamp development for the USPS Stamp Services Office, and Ethel Kessler, an Art Director who’s been working with Stamp Services for over 15 years. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-46- Vulcanite Dentures | Before the 1850s, dentures were made out of very hard, very painful and very expensive material, like gold or ivory. They were a luxury item. The invention of Vulcanite hard rubber changed everything. It was moldable, it could be precisely fitted, and it was relatively cheap. Everyone began making dentures with Vulcanite bases. But in 1864, a long disputed patent application, originally filed in 1852, was awarded and then acquired by the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company. It was an outfit created to collect fees, or very often, sue dentists who already used vulcanite, and there were plenty of dentists to go after. The person in charge of pursuing the violators was Josiah Bacon, the treasurer of the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company. The patent was enforced with extreme prejudice, despite the protestations of the US dental profession. To quote the secretary of the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company, Ernest Caduc: “Many dentists…relying upon the secret nature of the business, prefer to steal this property rather than buy it…” It all came to a head on Easter Sunday in 1879. A Vulcanite denture patent violating dentist named Samuel Chalfant went to settle his business with his pursuer, Josiah Bacon, in his San Francisco hotel room. Chalfant brought a gun. A print version of this story originally appeared in the fanzine Murder Can Be Fun by John Marr. | 1/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-45- Immersive Ideal | Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to be Afraid) and their last album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, came out in 2004. In the interim, the singer/guitarist/producer for Beauty Pill, Chad Clark, got very sick and nearly died. That can be enough to make anyone stop making music, but in Clark’s case, he continued to make music, but he just never felt the need to release a record or play live. His music was just for him and his friends, and that was OK. But a strange confluence of opportunity, desire and architecture knocked Beauty Pill out of their unforced exile. The curators at a new multimedia art center called Artisphere invited Chad Clark to come in and do something musical in the space. While they were showing him around, he saw the angled, 2nd floor window overlooking the Black Box Theater and it reminded him of the window in Abbey Road Studio 2, made famous by The Beatles. Months later, the Black Box Theater was transformed into a very public recording studio, capturing the sounds and energy of the band, onlookers and guests over the course of a couple weeks. They called the project Immersive Ideal. | 1/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-44- The Pruitt-Igoe Myth | The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the 1950’s were supposed to solve the impending population crisis in inner city St. Louis. It was supposed to save the urban poor from the indignities of the downtown slums that lacked natural light, water and fresh air. And for a short while, it worked. It was a housing marvel. But when conditions started to decline, everything got very bad, very fast. It got so bad, only two decades after it was built; the housing authority blew it up. The image of the first Pruitt-Igoe controlled implosion circled the globe. The implosion footage became the unassailable proof that Modernist architecture and federal housing just didn’t work. Chad Freidrichs is the director of the new documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and in the film he examines all the reasons people cite for the demise of Pruitt-Igoe. In this episode of 99% Invisible, we focus on the popular idea that the architecture was to blame. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-43- Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators | “There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?” -Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro’s screechy, wailing escalators” The Washington Post, 01/14/11 Ever since the industrial revolution, when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass produced, it has been the slight imperfections and wear introduced by human use that has transformed a quality mass produced product into a thing we love. Your worn blue jeans, your grandmothers iron skillet, the initial design determined their quality, but it’s their imperfections that make them comfortable, that make them lovable, that make them yours. And if you think that a “slightly broken” escalator can’t be lovable, then our own Sam Greenspan would like to introduce you to Chris Richards. Chris Richards is a music critic for the Washington Post, and after years of ignoring the wailing and screeching of the much maligned, often broken escalators in the DC Metro, he began to hear them in a new way. He began to hear them as music. | 12/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-42- Recognizably Anonymous | Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals who… have been variously described as hackers, hacktivists, free-expression zealots, Internet troublemakers, and assorted combinations thereof.” But when Anonymous came up against the Church of Scientiology, a small, non-hierarchical collection of Anons decided to take the disparate phrases, images and ideas circling around the 4Chan.org /b/ message board (where Anonymous has its roots) and combine them into a very engaging and effective “brand identity” (For lack of a better word. Is there a better word? I’d love to hear it. -rm). In this episode, Rob Walker explores the origins of the meme-like images in the Anonymous “visual brand” and explains why these icons so powerfully define a phenomenon that eschews definition. This piece was produced by me and Rob Walker based on his article “Recognizably Anonymous” in Slate. | 12/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-41- The Human-Human Interface | Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster show, Talk to Me, explored the communication between people and objects: from chairs that talk to subway kiosks. It’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated by all the human-object interactions in the modern world. I’ve never used a “coin return” button on a vending machine that worked and there is interesting criticism of the increasingly common “pictures under glass” type of interface on the iPhone and iPad. But as Paola Antonelli explains to producer Benjamen Walker (from Too Much Information), the evolution of communication design is pointing to a world that minimizes human-object interfaces and leaves us to free to focus on real human habits and needs. | 12/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-40- Billy Possum | It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was a cheap knock-off, an also-ran. As a consumer product, it’s completely out of your hands if you’re deemed a mighty Transformer, or a loathsome Gobot. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at all. But sometimes it does. This is the tale of two toys with two very different fates. The Teddy Bear, named after the charismatic president Theodore Roosevelt, was a sensation in the early twentieth century. It even displaced baby dolls as the top toy in all of the United States, but no one thought it would last. The burgeoning mass-market toy industry thought the bear was a novelty that would die out once Teddy Roosevelt left office in 1909. So the powers that be went on the search for the next cuddly companion that America’s children would adore. It was completely logical that they looked at the next president for inspiration, Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft. In 1909, the toy makers of America placed their bets on the Taft presidency’s answer to the Teddy Bear: the Billy Possum. This story comes to us from the insanely talented Jon Mooallem. He first presented a version of this story at Pop-Up Magazine #5 in San Francisco. Mooallem’s latest story for the New York Times Magazine is about the heroics of the Turtle People during the Gulf oil spill. He’s currently working on a book about people and animals for Penguin Press. He’s my favorite person to follow on twitter (@jmooallem) because he regularly posts strange animal facts that he comes across in his research. | 11/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-39X- The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet | United Nations Plaza sits in the center of San Francisco. Most people consider it a complete failure as a public space. Its central feature, at the entrance of the plaza, is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprin in 1975. The water shoots out at various angles, from inside a sunken pit, filled with large granite slabs. It’s a design that kind of pulls you in and invites you to take the steps down to the water and climb in between the hulking stones. And that’s part of the problem. In 2004, radio producer Ben Temchine, created a really fantastic documentary of UN Plaza, called “The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet” that first aired on my first radio program called Invisible Ink in May of 2004. (Yep another “invisible” show) The documentary really takes a hard look at UN Plaza when it was really at its worst and asks the question, is there a point where the good intentions and idealism of a design become so removed from reality, that it actually borders on negligence? | 11/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-39- Darth Vader Family Courthouse | It’s hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles, abuse, divorce- and if you were to design a place to reflect and amplify that misery, not mitigate it, it’d probably take the form of the old New York County Family Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. The original shiny black cube, built in 1975, was referred to as the “Darth Vader building” by court employees (presumably after 1977). The foreboding and intimidating structure is primarily criticized in relation to its function as a family courthouse, which should strive to inspire a feeling of trust, authority, and (one hopes) inclusion. The building was remodeled in 2006. The bones are largely the same, but the shiny, black cladding is gone, replaced by a more conventional grey/beige. The problematic entrance to the building has been completely opened up, making ingress and egress a much less daunting proposition. To quote our 99% Invisible reporter this week, Brett Myers, “walking into the building is no longer like being consumed by a beast.” But a little something was lost in the facelift. The original building was definitely not boring and commanded your attention. I don’t know if the same can be said for the current design. Modern design principles and cultural preservation are not necessarily at loggerheads, but when they do come into conflict, it’s not always easy to answer which ideology should win. | 10/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-38- Sound of Sport | If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. It sometimes means they fake it. Peregrine Andrews produced this piece narrated by Dennis Baxter for Falling Tree Productions for BBC Radio4. It is an extract from a much longer, and really stunning doc called “The Sound of Sport.” | 10/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-37- The Steering Wheel | If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do it. Without having a button to push, you could close your eyes and pretend push a button, and that action would accurately reflect the action of pushing a real button. The same goes for flipping a switch or turning a door knob. If you closed your eyes and faked the movement, it would sync up with its real world use. Now if I asked you to do the same with a car’s steering wheel, you’d think you’d be able to describe steering accurately and mime the correct movements with your hands in the air, but you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. You’d probably kill a bunch of imaginary people. Our friends at Humans in Design, Tristan Cooke and Tom Nelson, bring us this story about how our brain knows how to steer without really knowing how to steer, and what that means for steering wheel design. They interviewed Dr. Steve Cloete, from The University of Queensland, who conducted the awesome blind driver studies. | 9/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-36- Super Bon Bonn | Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall, people immigrate and emigrate, but most of these changes happen over decades. What happens to a city when its purpose is stripped away virtually overnight? Bonn was the quiet, unlikely capital of West Germany and then the newly unified Germany for 50 years, and then the Cold War ended and the seat of government was moved back to its historic home of Berlin. Ten years after the move, Bonn is finding its new identity and purpose, but hidden clues in the urban landscape remind us of the city it used to be. Cyrus Farivar takes us on a tour of his neighborhood in what used to be the diplomatic quarter of Bonn with local historian and tour guide Michael Wenzel. Farivar is the science and technology editor at Deutsche Welle English and the author of The Internet of Elsewhere – about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world. | 9/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-35- Elegy for WTC | I want to be careful not to overstate what it means for a building to die. A building’s worth is an infinitesimal fraction of the worth a person’s life. Even two buildings don’t even move the needle in comparison to real human loss. But a building is still a living thing in a way. It breathes and it moves. This movement makes a sound. Les Robertson, the structural engineer of the World Trade Center, says that the people working inside the tower couldn’t feel this movement, but they could hear it. This episode of 99% Invisible was produced with the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, and the creaking “Buildings Speak” section was mixed by Jim McKee of Earwax Productions. It’s comprised of extracts and outtakes from the Peabody Award Winning Sonic Memorial Project produced in 2002. A new, tenth anniversary edition of the Sonic Memorial Project, which is narrated by my literary hero Paul Auster, is going to be playing on public radio stations around the country. Find out where and when it’s playing on your local public radio station and make an appointment to listen. | 9/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-34- The Speed of Light for Building Pyramids | Last year, Steve Burrows CBE (Principle at the engineering consulting firm Arup) spent several weeks in Egypt studying the pyramids through the eyes of a modern day structural engineer. The result, which was presented in a documentary for the Discovery Channel and published in an article for DesignIntelligence, presented fascinating insights into the design of the pyramids and offers some lessons in how we may think about sustainability through longevity in modern architecture. Burrows’ research reveals that some of the same practical considerations that structural engineers and architects contend with today, may have driven all the major decisions about the design and construction of the Giza Pyramids. | 8/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-33- A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll | If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships, you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line. This marking is called the load line, or as I prefer, the Plimsoll line. This simple graphic design has saved thousands of lives. The Plimsoll line shows the maximum loading point of the ship and lets a third party know, plainly and clearly, when a vessel is overloaded and at risk of sinking in rough seas. If you see that horizontal line above the water, you’re good, if you don’t, you could be sunk. The load line was named after the crusading British MP Samuel Plimsoll. The advent of insurance in the 19th century, created an incentive for ship owners to purposely sink their own ships and collect the insurance money. This grim practice became so widespread, and killed so many merchant seamen, that the over-insured, overloaded vessels became known as “coffin ships.” Samuel Plimsoll (“the sailors friend”) fought for sweeping merchant shipping regulation that led to the adoption of the marking that bears his name. Tristan Cooke, a human factors engineer and creator of a great blog called Humans in Design, tells us the history of the Plimsoll line and explains why it’s one of his favorite examples of design. | 8/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-32- Design for Airports | When I spoke with Allison Arieff about the design of airports, she said to me, if all airports simply played Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports over the speakers, every airport would be better. I say this to serve not only as an introduction to Allison Arieff, but also so you’ll know that she is someone whose judgment is perfectly true. Using T2 at SFO as an example, Allison Arieff of the New York Times talks us through some of the considerations that go into designing an airport terminal, how the priorities have changed since 9/11, and how architects struggle to keep pace with ever-changing technology. | 7/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-31- Feltron Annual Report | Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed stunning graphs and maps and created concise infographics that detail that year’s activities. The results were originally intended for his friends and family, but the “personal annual reports” have found an audience with fellow designers and people that really geek out on seeing lots of data, beautifully presented. In 2010, Nicholas Felton’s father passed away, and Felton decided to turn his annual report into a full biography of his father. He took 4,348 of his father’s personal records and created an intimate portrait of a man, using only the data he left behind. I produced this story with Nate Berg, who is an awesome freelance journalist and blogger at Planetizen (a site you should add to your daily routine). | 7/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-30- The Blue Yarn | In 1998 Dr. Gary Kaplan, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle received some bad news about his hospital. It was losing money. So Dr. Kaplan started studying how other hospitals were being run to see if there was a better way to manage his hospital. He scoured the country, looking for a hospital with a management system worth adopting, but he never found one. Instead he ended up in Japan. At a Toyota factory. This entire, multiyear overhaul started with a ball of blue yarn. The staff met with a Toyota Production System sensei and he took out the ball of blue yarn and a map of the hospital and told the staff to trace the path a cancer patient would take on a typical visit for chemotherapy treatment. When they were finished, it was an immensely powerful visual experience for everyone in the room. They all stared at this map with blue yarn snaking all over the place, doubling back on itself and making complicated twists and turns from one end of the building to the other. They understood for the first time that they were taking their sickest patients, for whom time was their most precious resource, and they were wasting huge amounts of it. This story was produced by David Weinberg. David spoke with Charles Kenney, author of Transforming Healthcare and Dr. Henry Otero and Nurse Michele Wettland from Virginia Mason. | 6/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-29- Cul de Sac | When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort of like the mascot of the suburbs– like if suburbia had a flag, it would have a picture of a cul-de-sac on it. Cul-de-sacs by definition aren’t well connected to other streets and they are far away town centers. People can argue whether or not these are pros or cons, depending on what lifestyle choices they prioritize. For little kids, cul-de-sacs can be great, but they do have some real, quantifiable design flaws. Imagine being a garbage collector, or a street cleaner, instead of driving down one long street and collecting all the garbage from that street, then taking a right onto the next street and so on, you have to turn around in all of these cul-de-sacs over and over again. It takes more time and uses more gas. They’re expensive for governments to maintain, and now, governments are starting to enact regulations against them. Producer Katie Mingle talks with Matt Lassiter about cul-de-sacs, the pitfalls of suburban design, and of course, E.T. | 6/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-28- Movie Title Sequences | More and more I’m finding that the first 2-3 minutes of a movie are my favorite part of the film. My life is devoted to the beautiful expression of information, which is why film title sequences hold a special place in my heart. On this episode, I talk with Ian Albinson (Editor-in-Chief and Founder of the kick-ass Art of the Title) and the brilliant Gareth Smith (title sequence designer- along with his wife Jenny Lee- of such films as Juno and Up in the Air) about the benchmarks of film title design and the constraints involved in presenting what is essentially a legal document to a paying audience. | 6/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-27- Bridge to the Sky | There are rules that dicate what you can build and how. Rules of physics and rules of men who sit on various bureaucratic boards and bodies. These rules dictated that if silk magnate John Noble Stearns wanted to build one of those ten story towers that were all the rage in 1888, on his 22 foot wide lot, he would need to build walls of stone and brick that were 5 feet thick. With tiny windows. Which left room for an interior that was only 11 feet wide. Slice off a few feet for a hallway. A few for a bathroom. A couple for a coat closet. Another for some filing cabinets and an umbrella stand. And he would be asking his well heeled tenants to work in a dark cell better suited to monks illuminating manuscripts. Stearns asked the best architects in the northeast for a solution. They all told him it couldn’t be done. Everyone except Bradford Gilbert. This week’s episode is an original commission, produced by Nate Dimeo from the memory palace. | 6/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-26- Chicago’s Jailhouse Skyscraper | The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, is a federal jail right in the middle of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper, 27 stories, with tall, super-narrow, irregularly-spaced windows up and down each wall. The outside walls look like old computer punchcards. As odd as it looks, each of these striking details serve a purpose. The architect, Harry Weese, made bold innovations that were solutions to practical problems. The triangular shape creates easy sight-lines for the guards inside. The windows are narrow (5 inches) to prevent escapes (without requiring bars), but beveled out, to funnel natural light inside. The interior design was very thoughtfully considered as well. As stunning as it is, the building can also be a little hard to see from up close. Producer/reporter Dan Weissmann worked nearby for years and rarely looked up at it. This is apparently by design, as well. The triangular shape keeps the building pushed back from the street, there’s a tall hedge between the sidewalk and the plaza in front of the jail, and the El train blocks the much of the view of the floors above. But recently Dan kind of became obsessed with the MCC and discovered that Harry Weese’s groundbreaking design may still gain admirers from the throngs of people that pass it on the street, but for the 681 temporary residents inside, it may not be living up to Weese’s grand vision. | 5/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-25- Unsung Icons of Soviet Design | There’s something that links most of the everyday objects presented in “Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.” But it’s hard to tell exactly what that is just by looking at this collection of wobbly dolls, drinking glasses, primitive arcade games, and arsonistic space heaters. The essence, argues editor Michael Idov, is the system that built them: a post-WWII economy, mostly closed from the rest of the world, trying to transform its tank and grenade factories into places that churned out Western-style consumer goods. Idov grew up in Soviet Latvia with “some pretty terrible stuff,” but he believes the experience makes him, and other Soviet citizens, hyperaware of good design when they see it. Julia Barton explores the good, the bad, and the weird products of the former empire. | 5/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-24- The Capitol Columns | If you were present for any of the presidential inaugurations, from Andrew Jackson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, you saw the solemn oath of office taken between twenty-two smooth, sandstone columns at the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol Building. The slabs that made up the columns were considered so important that when they were transported from a barge on the Potomac River to Capitol Hill in 1824, they were pulled by man power alone, because lowly mules were deemed unfit to move such sacred objects. The columns did not have the same standing in 1958. During the renovation of the East Portico, the columns were removed, crated and stored, until a couple of women fought to put them back on their feet in the National Arboretum. Other parts of the façade were also carted away in the renovation, but they didn’t get quite the same treatment. The episode was produced by Sam Greenspan and Jess Schreibstien, with help from Melissa Lee and John Asante. The four of them have their own fledgling podcast called Whisper Cities. It presents stories of overheard and out-of-site places. | 5/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-23- You Are Listening To + Radio Net | youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is an intriguing, and distinctly live, experience (unlike most of the time shifted audio I tend to consume). Its other appeal is its simple and elegant execution. There are three component parts: a police radio stream from Radio Reference, a pre-screened ambient music playlist from SoundCloud, and a cool photo from Flickr. Each element is from some other source, that never could have envisioned that this is the way their content would be used. This is the power of a sharable and mashable web. As a bonus this week, I've added a story I did in 2005 about another radio obsession of mine called Radio Net. For two hours on 200 NPR stations in 1977, sound artist Max Neuhaus conducted a massive, experimental audio symphony using processed sound from callers all around the nation. This Radio Net piece was originally broadcast on Re:sound from the Third Coast International Audio Festival | 4/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-22- Free Speech Monument | In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which began on the University of California Berkeley Campus in 1964. The winning design, created by Mark Brest van Kempen (who was then a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute), is an invisible sculpture that creates a small space completely free from laws or jurisdiction. The six inch circle of soil, and the “free” column of airspace above it, is framed by a six foot granite circle. The inscription on the granite reads, “This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.” The six inch free space acts as a beacon for speakers and political events. When you stand next to it today, 20 years after it was installed, you’d never suspect the contentious battle and the ironic compromise that finally led to its placement in Sproul Plaza. | 4/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-21- BLDGBLOG: On Sound | Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise from the street and insulate you from those jarring clangs of industry. Geoff Manaugh loves the intersection of sound and architecture, but he’s primarily interested in those cases where buildings and spaces are designed to harness environmental sounds and bring acoustics into the architectural equation in clever ways. Manaugh's BLDGBLOG is a site about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. Can you imagine anything better? It’s essential reading. Nick van der Kolk from the amazing Love + Radio podcast (Vocalo.org) produced this piece. | 3/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-20- Nikko Concrete Commando | In 2001, Delfin Vigil was walking the streets of San Francisco and ran across the name “Nikko” carved into the concrete sidewalk. After seeing Nikko once, Delfin began to see the name everywhere. One block after another, there he was again and again: Nikko. The carvings numbered in the hundreds, seemed to go back decades, and Delfin Vigil became obsessed with finding San Francisco’s mysterious “concrete commando.” Vigil’s story about the hunt for Nikko is beautifully written and illustrated (by Paul Madonna) in his self-published chapbook available at The Rumpus. It’s outstanding. The original, audio version of this story was produced by my future employer Stephanie Foo for the smokin’ hot, new public radio program Snap Judgment. | 3/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-19X- RJDJ Reactive Music | This week, the radio audience heard episode #10, but for you web and podcast listeners, I have a story I did about a year and a half ago, about the reactive music app called RJDJ. I did this piece for an ill fated tech show pilot that was never broadcast, which totally bummed me out at the time, but I found a way to get some of the tape and ideas into episode #3 of 99% Invisible about augmented reality. I think that episode by itself worked, but to keep the show tight and on point, I cut a lot of the cooler aspects of the original story about the broader implications of reactive music and where it fits into the evolution of music. So, here it is in it’s full glory. Enjoy! Thanks for checking it out. | 3/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-19- Liberation Squares plus NY Dick | In a recent piece from Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti (Professor at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University), wrote about how urban open spaces contribute to political change, "Public spaces like Tompkins Square, Tiananmen Square and Tahrir Square have been stages for history because they provide the loci for urban gathering, particularly for a city’s youth...One could argue that without cities and the spaces they inspire, nations themselves would never change." Host of WFMU’s Too Much Information, Benjamen Walker, took a walk with Chakrabarti down to Tompkins Square Park to talk about the past and present design of the space and how the layout has affected the public actions that have taken place there. Chakrabarti also relates this to the current protests in the Middle East. Twitter and Facebook may have had a significant role in organizing the protests, but if there is no place for everyone to gather, what possible change can result? For you podcast listeners (and website streamers) I’ve also added a very 99% Invisible excerpt from Benjamen Walker’s brilliant radio program Too Much Information. This is a piece called “New York Dick” from the What A Difference Makes episode from Jan 17, 2011. Enjoy! | 3/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-18- Check Cashing Stores | A few years ago, journalist Douglas McGray learned that the largest chain of check cashing stores in Southern California, Nix Check Cashing, was being bought by the nation’s largest credit union, Kinecta. The credit union thought it had something to learn from the check casher about how to reach out and serve the poor. This was curious. McGray’s impression was that check cashers (and especially payday lenders) were predatory, the bad guys, and that credit unions, especially one dedicated to serving the poor, were the good guys. This proposed sale made McGray look at the whole situation with fresh eyes. I highly recommend reading Douglas McGray’s New York Times Magazine article all about it. It’s excellent. I, of course, was drawn to the design aspects of the story. Check cashing stores can feel very odd when you’re not used to them. Quite simply, they are often designed to look and feel more like a corner store. The furnishings are sparse, and the information is on signs— big, bold and clearly presented. Banks, on the other hand, have a design legacy of carpeting, heavy desks, suits, and pamphlets that are hard to parse. If you were to start over and design a financial products retail location today, which model would you follow? | 3/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-17- Concrete Furniture | The New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was the first modern, concrete, civic building in Toronto. When it opened in 1965, it stood out very prominently in the traditional Victorian fabric of the city. The striking concrete design was carried throughout the building and was even incorporated into the office furniture. Desks, coffee tables, cabinets- they all had concrete legs- and nearly everyone hated it. A lot. The public was angry. Controversy ensued. Someone even resigned. But reporter Sean Cole found at least one person, architect Masha Kelmans, who thinks the naysayers were wrong. | 2/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-16- A Designed Language | The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures could communicate freely and easily, and it would foster international understanding and peace. This is the idea behind the invention of Esperanto. It was a linguistic solution to what seemed like a linguistic problem. Esperanto may not have achieved the goal of ubiquity and international peace, but it has become the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Much of its success has to do with its design as a language. The grammar is very regular and easy to learn, but it also has a flexible and poetic nature that facilitates wordplay and artistic expression. For this episode I talked with Sam Green, director of the live documentary Utopia in Four Movements and Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language. | 2/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-15- Sounds of the Artificial World | Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special “theater of the mind” that users completely buy into. Electronic things are made to feel mechanical. It’s the feeling of movement, texture and articulation where none exists. We talk with Sound Designer Jim McKee of Earwax Productions about the art of designing organic sounds for inorganic things. | 2/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-14- Periodic Table | Everyone knows it when they see it. The classic “castle with turrets” periodic table is a beautiful and concise icon that contains a great deal of amazing information, if you only know how to read it. And even if you don’t know anything about the table, it’s still easy to admire and get lost in. Author of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean, talks us through the design of the table that hung in the front of your science class for years, but you probably never really understood. | 2/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-13x-Game Over (Snap Judgment) | 99% Invisible Extra! The tape rolls as we witness the tearful end of a perfect online world. This is a piece I did for Snap Judgment, based on a story from Robert Ashley's brilliant A Life Well Wasted internet radio program. New episodes of 99% Invisible start on 02/04/11. Stay tuned. | 1/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-13- Maps | I’m sorry, but if you don’t love maps, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Maps are amazing. They are art and story. A representation of where we are and where we wish we could be. They’ve always had a power over me. Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, a new atlas of San Francisco maps, explores the poetry, beauty and arbitrary nature of maps to the fullest. The assembled cartographers, researchers, writers and artists have rendered twenty-two maps that tell strange and surprising stories about the Bay Area. Each point of fact and odd juxtaposition presents just one of the infinite possible visions of the city. | 12/16/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-12- 99% Guilt Free | “Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the negative impact to the natural environment.” -Jason F. McLennan, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design I like McLennan’s definition of sustainable design because it’s broken into two parts (1) minimizing negative impact, and (2) maximizing quality. Minimizing the negative is a given that I think everyone understands (and is absolutely critical, no doubt), but it’s the aspect of sustainable design that is also seeking to “maximize the quality of the built environment” that I find really inspiring. That is what intrigued me about Civil Twilight’s Lunar-resonant Streetlights. This project won the 2007 Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition partly because explored the serious issue of massive energy consumption by excessive outdoor lighting by offering a poetic solution that really focused on maximizing quality. Civil Twilight’s streetlights sense and respond to ambient moonlight and allow people in urban areas to reconnect with the nighttime cycles that were lost long ago to light pollution. | 12/3/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-11- 99% Undesigned | Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful and will be that way forever. The awesome Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on The Brain and a fellow at the New America Foundation, talks us through the design of a world that completely disregards the perils of oil consumption and how new designs are meant to make us all more content with the mess we’ve made. | 11/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-10- 99% Sound and Feel | Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more preposterous, composing music you can’t hear, or designing architecture you can’t see?” Chris Downey had been an architect for 20 years before he lost his sight. It would be understandable to think that going blind would mean the end of his career, but that turned out not to be the case at all. | 11/19/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-09X-99% Doomed | 99% Invisible Extra! NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we leap to Mars, we might not make it back. This is a story I produced last year (Summer 2009) for a public radio tech show pilot that didn't get picked up, and since I am taking a week off of the radio program, and this story presents a cool design challenge (and solution!), I thought it would make a nice, extra long 99% Invisible bonus story. I hope you dig it. | 11/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-09- 99% Private | Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but are mandated for public use. City planners require developers to add these little “parks” to their buildings to make downtown more pleasant (or even just tolerable). Some are out in the open and used regularly by downtown office workers, and some are hidden away and don’t really serve the community all that well. They pop up in the most densely populated parts of the city, where large public parks are few and far between. Whereas the physical aspect of POPOS are pretty well established by the city planners, the social aspects of what constitutes a “public” space is harder to define. Blaine Merker, from the badass design activist group Rebar, showed superstar producer Stephanie Foo around a few of San Francisco’s POPOS to find out just how public these open spaces really are. | 11/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-08- 99% Free Parking | It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently unreliable meters. The signage can be indecipherable. As a point of interaction with your municipality, it’s just a nightmare. Plus, from an urban planning perspective, the spaces themselves are a horribly mismanaged city resource. A new pilot program in San Francisco is looking to change all that. SFPark is trying to use smart parking to make a smarter and better designed city. This episode features Jay Primus, Manager of the SFPark project and Donald Shoup, author of the highly influential book called, The High Cost of Free Parking. | 10/29/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-07- 99% Alien | Humans need a few basic things to survive- air, water, food, heat, shelter- but just surviving isn’t really enough. We also need familiarity, a little comfort, interaction, a small place of our own. When it comes to designing space habitat modules, engineers have that first set of basic needs covered, but figuring out the how to incorporate those other things, that not only keep an astronaut alive, but also mentally healthy and happy, is a little more complicated. The funniest and coolest science writer in the world, Mary Roach guides us through the evolution of space habitat modules and how far design can be optimized for zero g before astronauts start to lose it. | 10/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-06- 99% Symbolic | Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn’t even know cities had their own flags. In Chicago, the city flag is everywhere. It’s incorporated into all different aspects of city life and the design elements are used on businesses, websites, clothing and apparel. So when I moved back to San Francisco in 2008, I looked up our city flag and wondered why I never really noticed it before. Ugh, now I know. Ted Kaye, editor of Raven- a scholarly journal of vexillology and treasurer of the North American Vexillological Association, helps me understand the principles of good flag design and imagines with us a better flag for the greatest city on earth (IMHO). | 10/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-05- 99% Forgotten | At the top of Mt. Olympus in San Francisco, on what was once thought to be the geographic center of the city, is a pedestal for a statue that isn't there. There's no marker. You can just make out the word "erected" on the stone surface, but there's nothing that lets anyone know that this was once the site of San Francisco's own (much smaller) statue of liberty and light. It is now surrounded by 1950's condos, and even though it offers some of the best views of the city, I've only met two people who have even heard of it (and I asked around a lot). CCA architecture historian Bill Littmann shows us around. | 9/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-04- 99% Details | It’s a stick with bristles poking out of it. It doesn’t even qualify as a simple machine, but the careful thought and design that went into the creation of the modern, angled bristle, fat handled toothbrush shows just how much brainpower goes into something that is designed to simply work well and not be noticed all that much (until it’s time to buy the next one). This piece features John Edson, President of LUNAR. | 9/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-03- 99% Reality (only) | There’s not much that we can do about all the physical matter that’s been designed and built by someone else. It is the way it is. But with the advent of portable devices with GPS, a compass, and a network, we can now design a layer on top of the real world that can contain all kinds of new information, ideas, and experiences. This is called augmented reality. When most people use the term, they are talking about a visual experience. You hold up the camera of your smart phone and infographics overlay the image of the the thing right in front of you. But for my money, the best experience of augmented reality is auditory. Using the iPhone platform, RJDJ is exploring the next phase of music, called reactive music. Compositions coming out the headphones are completely unique, mixed in the smart phone, having incorporated data from the listeners environment. | 9/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-02- 99% 180 | In the beginning, former AIA-SF president Henrik Bull and the Transamerica Pyramid did not get along. The building was an affront to late 1960’s modernist ideals. It was silly. It looked like a dunce cap. Its large scale had no respect for the neighborhood in which it lived. But over 40 years, something happened… | 9/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise | This episode of 99% Invisible is all about acoustic design, the city soundscape, and how to make listening in shared spaces pleasant (or at the very least, possible). It features an interview with Dennis Paoletti from Shen Milsom 8 Wilke. | 9/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 51 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
100% treasure
Roman has a uncanny knack for focusing on topics which are part of my peripheral curiosity and making them center-stage for further exploration. He is engaging, a masterful sound designer, smart and funny. I highly recommend giving 99% invisible a listen - you will be hooked.
Fascinating!
I stumbled upon this podcast and it was like finding a diamond in a pile of rocks. Short, sweet and always intriguing. Love it!
Right on!
That TAL + Radio Lab thing I love, in bite-sized chunks. All from one of the most interesting people I've ever met.
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