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What are your favourite episodes of 99% Invisible?
99% Invisible is a podcast about "the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world". Episodes from other podcasts that have a similar theme are always welcome.
Edit: moved my favourites to a comment.
I teach usability engineering at university, and during the first lecture I give I stand up at the entrance to the lecture theatre and stop students from engaging the hold-open leg on the bottom of the door so it keeps closing after them - because it is a classic Norman Door and you get that perfect 'bang' of students trying to pull it open when it is a push. I then show them this Vox video, which maybe doesn't quite count as a 99% invisible episode, but they were involved.
Episode 95: Future Screens Are Mostly Blue - it changed the way I look at seemingly bad designs in movies. I remember the number and name by heart, I reference it so often.
Edit: here's a link!
Man that makes me want to have those kind of sounds in Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen. It'd be a lot easier to keep track of where they are that way!
Curb cuts is a great one. Other ones I've liked:
Usonia the Beautiful
Welcome to Jurrasic Art
But one of my favorites is The Revolutionary Post, and I think this would be of particular interest to the Tildes audience since so much of it is applicable and interesting to the types of people who care about the internet as a place to exchange ideas.
Also, if we're counting Articles of Interest, I loved the one on Plaid.
Before I listened to it, I didn’t think Curb Cuts sounded like anything special, but it ended up being surprisingly enjoyable, and became one of my favourite episodes!
I think I’ll check out The Revolutionary Post tonight, it looks really interesting from a quick skim of the article.
So far I've really enjoyed The Accidental Room (332), The Automat (356), and Curb Cuts (308).
Links for the lazy:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-automat/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
It's been years since I've listened to them, but looking through the Wikipedia page here are some I seem to remember being good.
Razzle Dazzle
Kowloon Walled City
The Modern Moloch
Game Changer
No Armed Bandit
Trading Places with Planet Money
Longbox
PDX Carpet
Manzanar
El Gordo
Guerrilla Public Service and Guerrilla Public Service Redux
More links for the lazy:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-65-razzle-dazzle/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-66-kowloon-walled-city/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-77-game-changer/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-78-no-armed-bandit/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-84-ladislav-sutnar-trading-places-with/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/longbox/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/pdx-carpet/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/manzanar/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/el-gordo/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/guerrilla-public-service/
p.s. Thanks for introducing me to this podcast, @what. I had somehow never heard of it before, but greatly enjoyed all the ones I have listened to so far today.
I’m glad you’re enjoying it, this podcast does a great job making some more mundane or obscure things interesting.
I was first introduced to it from a podcast thread I made around a year ago (wow, it doesn’t seem like that long!), there are tons of other great podcast recommendations there.
By the way, thanks for providing all the links :)
Huh, weird, I even made a bunch of comments in that topic and bookmarked a ton of the recommendations but somehow missed the 99% invisible ones.
And NP about the links. It may seem entirely altruistic, but I assure you it's not... by doing that, now I have a list of recommended podcast espisodes in my own comment history to go back and listen to eventually. ;)
Structural Integrity is great; I love that I'd never heard the story before. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural-integrity-2/
Ten Thousand Years is hilarious. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
Duplitecture is fascinating. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/duplitecture/
The vexillology TED talk was fascinating to me even before I discovered 99pi.
Really, I love all the 99% episodes. They're so unique and appealing.
Except for the Snowflake episode. Something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. MCS seems too similar to the essential oils or homœopathy believers or more crazy stuff like flat earth or antivaxxers.
A family member of mine has symptoms similar to MCS, but he blames "magnetism" and "radio waves" and tries to separate himself from proximity to WiFi and gets agitated if people are on their cell phones around him.
It's a bit different from flat earthers or anti-vaxxers in that they're making a positive claim about their own sense of health. We can't really second guess that they're feeling what they're feeling and they happen to have such similar baskets of symptoms and report a sense of relief from similar kinds of separation from many modern conveniences.
It probably is just psychosomatic, but that's still a thing. Something about exposure to contemporary society is making these people feel sick, we just don't know what it is. It's not unheard of for generalized anxiety or other sorts of mental disorder to end up manifesting as physical symptoms.
Yeah it's probably psychosomatic. But that's why I think the episode came off poorly to me. I'm worried that more people will hear about the phenomenon and develop their own "MCS". Legitimizing the condition and spreading awareness about it could do more harm than good. We're so good at convincing ourselves of stuff, especially when others feel the same way...
I'm from Snowflake. I feel it important to point out that Snowflake is a regular town like any other with regular people. But if you go several miles out of town into the middle of nowhere, that's where you find the "East of towners" who are, shall we say, "unique". Some of the East of towners are the people that episode is about. While Snowflake is the town closest to where they live (except Concho, but Concho is less of a town and more of a handful of houses), they are not representative of Snowflake.