After several years of working as a producer and sound designer, he was approached by the station in 2010 to develop a one-minute radio segment about architecture, a subject with which he had become enamored during a stretch spent living in Chicago. Mars asked for four-and-a-half minutes, and the segment, inserted into the local news section of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” became an early testing ground for what would turn into “99% Invisible.”
“It was a culmination of everything I wanted to do on a show,” Mars said. “I wanted a little bit of ‘Radiolab,’ a little bit of ‘Memory Palace,’ a little bit of Benjamin Walker’s ‘Theory of Everything,’ a little bit of James Brooks’s ‘Connections.’ As a subject, design had already been picked apart in lots of ways. But I really wanted to focus on the problem-solving aspect and the stories behind these objects that we encounter in the world.”
Early episodes included an interview with an acoustic designer and a meditation from the producer Katie Mingle on the golden age of suburban cul-de-sacs.
It took a while for the show to find its place. Mars pitched the segment to several other public radio stations and received little interest. Undeterred, he tried posting episodes to a Tumblr page before a friend convinced him to turn the show into a podcast.
At the time, the medium had yet to go mainstream, with few shows reaching an audience of more than a million listeners. But one of them, “Radiolab,” happened to be hosted by fan of Mars’s, Jad Abumrad, who featured an episode of “99% Invisible” on his show in 2011.
“Our audience growth after that looked like a hockey stick,” Mars said. “There weren’t so many great podcasts back then, and we could see that people were just going through our archive and downloading everything.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/arts/siriusxm-99-invisible-roman-mars.html
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