The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

Design Theory

16 Jan

This beautifully designed and illustrated book by 99pi host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt will show you new sides to all kinds of seemingly ordinary designs all around you.

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast and website about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive on, and sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with tales of exceptional designers but also everyday designs.

Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, show host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the key details about how our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs.

With beautiful line drawings throughout by artist Patrick Vale, this 400-page volume will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design processes, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.

Roman Mars

Roman Mars is the host and creator of 99% Invisible, a sound-rich, narrative podcast about the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world. With approximately 500 million downloads, the 99% Invisible podcast is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Fast Company named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in 2013. He was a TED main stage speaker in 2015. It is currently the most popular TED Talk about design with over 6.5 million views. His crowdfunding campaigns have raised over $4 million and he's the highest-funded journalist in Kickstarter history. He is also a co-founder of Radiotopia, a collective of ground-breaking independent podcasts.

Kurt Kohlstedt

Kurt Kohlstedt is a writer and editor at 99% Invisible, a radio show and website about design. With over 400,000,000 downloads to date, 99pi is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Kurt has gone on tour with the show, given talks and participated in panels on various subjects from how Kindergartens shaped Modern art and design to creative adaptive reuse strategies for big-box stores.

In 2007, Kurt founded WebUrbanist, the first in a series of online urban architecture, art and design and publications that would go on to reach hundreds of millions of readers over the decade that followed.