Histry of button
Histry of button
The button—with its self-contained roundness and infinite variability—has a quiet perfection to it. Running a cascade of buttons through your fingers feels satisfyingly heavy, like coins or candy; their clicking whoosh and blur of colors lull you. A button packs an extraordinary amount of information about a given time and place—its provenance—onto a crowded little canvas. Children learn to button and unbutton early in life, and they keep doing it until they’re dead.
6. 99% Invisible, “The Sound of the Artificial World” (2011)
Some 99% Invisible episodes make me crave a visual supplement. (What did the lost walled city of Kowloon look like?) But in this episode, Roman Mars’ beloved short-form design podcast asks how sound designers make “organic sounds for inorganic things.” The clicks, sproings, and clatters that sound engineer Jim McKee demonstrates for Mars are the background noise of everyday life for people who use digital devices. The episode singles these sounds out for analysis and deconstructs their origin, a classic 99% approach that works beautifully. You may find yourself looking toward your phone several times during the episode’s five-minute run, thinking you’ve received a text—a weird overlap of podcast and life that makes the episode’s point perfectly.
