Since Facebook reported last week that hackers had stolen access tokens to almost 50 million accounts, there have been no signs that the perpetrators leaked any user data online or published content on the site without permission.

That’s an encouraging sign, say security experts. “The good news is there’s no evidence that it’s happened, and trust me, everybody’s looking,” Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at security firm Sophos, told Fast Company.

But many Facebook users are understandably still concerned about the ramifications of the attack, which could have allowed hackers to siphon off personal data about themselves or their friends, or potentially gain access to third-party sites and apps that support Facebook login. Those services run the gamut from dating services like Tinder and Bumble to streaming services including Spotify and Tidal to e-commerce sites such as Etsy and Airbnb.

“Most of those [thousands of] businesses that are using Facebook login have no clue that they may be at risk, or may have been at risk,” says Dean Nicolls, head of global marketing at identity verification company Jumio.

Again, there’s been no evidence that any such services have actually been compromised, but some companies have taken steps to reassure users. “Spotify has not experienced a security breach,” a spokesperson for the music streaming service said in an emailed statement. “We take the security of our users’ data very seriously and we recognize that many people share login information across various platforms. As a precaution, concerned users can update their Spotify password, or if the account was created through Facebook, the Facebook login via their instructions.”

At the same time, there are some simple steps you can take to keep your Facebook and other accounts more secure from future attacks, in addition to staying vigilant about potential fallout from this one.

Use Secure Passwords and a Trusted Password Manager

Changing passwords is one of several steps experts say concerned users can take in the wake of the breach. Though the complex hack apparently only took digital tokens used to keep users logged in to Facebook–rather than traditional passwords–changing to a new secure password can’t do any harm, and it can give users an opportunity to make sure they’re using a unique, difficult-to-guess password for Facebook and other services.

Using password manager software that securely stores passwords and makes them available across devices is generally also a good idea. They keep passwords in files encrypted with user-specific passwords, which can make them less susceptible to security breaches.

And as password managers have gotten easier to use, they can, in some cases, replace the need for single sign-on services like those provided by Facebook and Google. Some managers can even automatically help you change your password to a secure, randomly generated one on commonly used websites, writes Greg Arnette, technical evangelist at Barracuda Networks, in an email to Fast Company.

“The password manager can also flag accounts where the [passwords] have been re-used,” he writes.

Users who want to switch their account on other services from Facebook login to using a traditional username and password may need to create new accounts in some cases, says Wisniewski. Some services allow switching, but not all do.

Check Your Facebook Settings and Posts

In a blog post last week, Facebook suggested users can visit the “Security and Login” tab within the site’s settings menu. There, they can see a list of any services where they’re signed in with Facebook and sign out of any they’re not using it or no longer want to use it through Facebook login.

Users can also see on which devices they’re logged into Facebook, disconnecting any they don’t recognize or don’t want logged in, says Candid Wueest, principal threat researcher at security firm Symantec. They can also check their recent posts and Facebook messages for any signs that their accounts might have been used in spamming or phishing attacks.

“We recommend that people of course verify the last, say, 10 posts on their timeline,” Wueest says.

People who log in to other services using Facebook can also check any account histories those services offer to make sure their accounts haven’t been used in unauthorized ways.

Enable Two-Factor Authentication and Notifications

Using two-factor authentication, which requires you do something to verify your identity beyond simply entering a password, wouldn’t have protected users from the recent Facebook hack because of the particular vulnerability used. But generally speaking, it can still be a good way to help keep online services like Facebook secure.

Facebook has recently been criticized for allowing phone numbers enabled for text-based two-factor authentication to be used to target ads, but the company also offers the option to use alternative verification methods, including using third-party two-factor authentication apps like Google Authenticator or Authy. Using such apps can also reduce the risk of hackers defeating two-factor login by stealing texts or tricking phone companies into giving them access to other people’s accounts.

Some apps and sites can also provide email or text notifications when you log in to their systems. These can be a nuisance if you sign up for too many of them, but they can also be valuable if you’re concerned about unauthorized access to your accounts.

“You gotta decide how risk-averse you want to be,” says Wisniewski.

Watch for Phishing Scams

As of now, it’s still unclear who is responsible for the mammoth Facebook hack and what data they’ve managed to hold on to. One possibility is that they’ll use it as a source of data for phishing attacks. Clever hackers often research targets so that they can pretend to be their employers, friends, or relatives, and the Facebook attackers could do the same.

Scammers could even falsely claim to have sensitive data from the hack, demanding a ransom in exchange for not releasing it. Which is why it’s always a good idea to remember that most timeless of digital-age adages. “Don’t trust everything you read on the internet,” says Wueest.

RuPaul’s Drag Race has forged a path into mainstream culture for the drag and LGBTQIA+ communities like no other show has. Since airing in 2009, the show has picked up nine Emmys, launched or catapulted the careers of more than 100 queens, and has spawned the bicoastal event RuPaul’s DragCon. Split between Los Angeles and New York City, DragCon has become the mecca for all things drag–for all kinds of people. According to demographics from DragCon LA 2018, attendees were 60% female, 40% male; 38% gay, 38% straight, 24% other; and 55% were under the age of 30–and DragCon NYC, which took place over this past weekend, was no different.

“This is a business. It’s all about ratings and demographics, and those sort of stats on a sheet. But to actually meet people and to see the extent of diversity kind of defies all those demographics. That’s been the real learning curve,” said Fenton Bailey, cofounder of DragCon and Drag Race production company World of Wonder in a previous interview with Fast Company. “I truly believe that drag is universally relatable. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to be a drag queen, but I think it’s something that everybody can enjoy. It’s just so exciting to see an audience feel that they have permission to enjoy it and to participate.”

Check out photos from DragCon NYC 2018 below.

“I wish you were here with me, Harry, so I could hand the products to you. These really are products that you have to feel—and I don’t mean physically. I mean see, use, touch. And then you get a feeling for it.”

Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay is giving me a preview of the company’s new lineup of Surface devices. We’re speaking via voice call, with no supporting visuals, which sounds like the most low-fidelity way conceivable to learn about gadgets whose ambitious industrial design is a principal selling point. But Panay, the designer who has been synonymous with Surface since Microsoft unveiled its first tablets in 2012, exudes passion like few tech spokespeople do. He can do more over a shaky phone line than some presenters manage in person with the products in question in front of them.

As Panay steps me through Microsoft’s news—which it announced today at a press event in New York—I learn that the new Surface models aren’t major departures, designwise, from their predecessors. Instead, the Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, and Surface Studio 2 are about keeping the line fresh, with component upgrades such as faster processors and (for the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2) a new black color option. Microsoft is also applying the Surface brand and aesthetic to a pair of wireless headphones, the company’s first foray into that product category.

During our chat, Panay confirms that Microsoft has had to learn how to design and deliver multiple products in parallel. “I’m exhausted just talking about four of them at the same time,” he jokes. “It is amazing just how much—humbly—we’ve been able to grow as both a business and as a company. And being able to put so many different groups across the company together to focus on shipping this many products.”

As usual, Panay says that Microsoft is trying to design hardware that people will be proud to own, and isn’t afraid to lavish praise on the results. “You can feel its elegance—-it almost feels timeless now,” he says of the new black-finish Surface Pro. But maybe even more than in the past, he also stresses that the goal of Microsoft hardware is to let the company’s customers delve into using Microsoft software—namely, Windows 10, as well as productivity tools such as Office—without disruption. He describes the Surface Laptop 2 as “muted and quiet” and says it aims to “become the essence of you getting into your flow . . . and never coming out of it.” The notebook’s full-travel keyboard, he adds, offers “one of the best typing experiences you’ve put your hands on.” (He doesn’t need to mention widespread dissatisfaction with the keyboards on recent MacBook models to score a point against the competition.)

“The preciousness of time”

Of course, helping people focus on getting stuff done has been core to Microsoft’s vision of itself for decades. But how it expresses that aspiration is a moving target. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate VP for modern life and devices, has seen a lot of that evolution during his 26 years at the company. Last year, he took a three-month sabbatical; when he returned, colleagues asked him what the highlight of his time off had been. “Ironically, as I stopped and reflected, the big thing for me above all else was being able to be in that moment with my family or my friends and not be distracted by a beeping phone saying, ‘Hey, go get to this,’ or ‘get back to something else,'” he explains. “It just brought to life for me the preciousness of time.”

Mehdi says that this intermingling of our professional and personal selves—and the challenges thereof—really started to matter when the smartphone became a mainstream productivity tool, and big companies began to allow employees to use their own phones rather than foisting some corporate-sanctioned model on them.”I guess it’s like somewhere between three to five years ago it happened in earnest,” he estimates. “Maybe a little earlier.”

You can quibble about that timeline: Many companies began recalibrating themselves for the “bring your own device” age sometime around the beginning of this decade. Moreover, the demarcation of life’s boundaries has been eroding for ages. Back in 1994, a classic 1994 AT&T commercial showed a guy using a tablet to send a fax from the beach—a scenario that was supposed to be cool and futuristic.

Still, Mehdi is far from the only tech exec who’s concluded that products should increasingly acknowledge that there’s such a thing as being too connected. Notably, both Google and Apple have built new features into their mobile platforms to counterbalance the smartphone’s unparalleled ability to intrude upon meaningful human interaction. Microsoft, no longer a player in smartphone operating systems, can’t do anything comparable. What it can do is to bring its own approach to addressing some of the same overarching issues by thinking of them in terms of productivity.

In May, at its Build developer conference, the company offered a sneak peek at Your Phone, a new Windows 10 feature designed to let you get at some of your smartphone’s functionality—such as text-messaging capability and photo storage—from a Windows PC, thereby allowing you to accomplish tasks without juggling devices. Arriving as part of this month’s Windows 10 update, Your Phone is meatiest if you’ve got an Android phone, since Google’s mobile operating system allows Microsoft deeper access to system functions than Apple’s more locked-down iOS.

“On Android, we can do a lot of very rich things,” Mehdi acknowledges. But he adds that Microsoft can bring some of its vision of undistracted productivity to iPhone users as well, especially since the company offers some widely used iPhone apps, such as Outlook Mobile and the SwiftKey keyboard.

Microsoft would presumably be happy to exchange our reality for an alternate one in which Windows is widely used on phones and it has greater ability to stitch together multiple devices into one experience. Then again, the ongoing vitality of the PC as a productivity-centric device—long after pundits predicted its demise—gives the company plenty of opportunities to help people combat tech distraction. Maybe even some that other companies don’t have, given that PCs are still likely to get our undivided, extended attention rather than be something we check 80 times a day, often for a moment or two at a time. Mehdi even talks about the possibility of using notifications, not to divert users’ attention, but to help them get into the groove—such as encouraging people to take care of a mundane task such as correcting typos in Word, which Microsoft research shows is a good way to steel yourself for the aspects of a writing project that require heavier mental lifting.

“We’re just really excited about this new era of personal productivity,” he says. “What it means for people and what it means for us as a company.”

When Amazon announced on October 2 that it would be implementing a $15 minimum wage for all of its U.S. workers in the next few weeks–including those hired on a contract or part-time basis–the response hovered between a sense that this was a long time coming, and surprise that it’s happening at all.

For years, Amazon’s treatment of workers has drawn scrutiny. Reports have surfaced that at the tech giant’s warehouses, workers forego restroom breaks to avoid punishment and endure grueling shifts for little pay. They’re given little time off, and required to meet demanding production goals. While full-time fulfillment center workers earn around $15 per hour, according to the company, and are entitled to benefits after a year of work and stock options after two, they often don’t make it that long. Amazon has been less forthcoming about how it pays contract and part-time workers, but it’s likely less. Furthermore, reports have found that there are few benefits to the surrounding community when the company opens a new warehouse nearby. Given that Amazon is valued at over $1 trillion, and its CEO Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person, the contrast is striking.

But pressure from activists like the Fight for 15 movement, workers, and politicians have turned the heat up under the company to rectify the discrepancy between worker treatment and company profitability. Since Amazon acquired Whole Foods last year, workers at the grocery chain have been pushing to unionize (despite facing opposition from the company). In early September, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced the Stop BEZOS Act–BEZOS coyly stands for “Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies,” but is very obviously a shot at the Amazon CEO–to call on large companies to raise worker pay.

In part, Steinbaum says, Amazon is just keeping pace with national trends. “There has been little upward wage pressure in the economy, despite the fact that we’ve had relatively low unemployment since the Great Recession,” he says. The fact that ordinary workers have seen barely any meaningful growth in wages in the past four decades, while executive pay continues to grow at a steady rate, reflects many issues in the way that modern companies operate. For one thing, companies are more beholden to their shareholders than their workers; profits are returned to people who own stock in the company, not who keep it running. In turn, it benefits companies to cut costs where they can–often from worker’s salaries–to keep shareholder returns high. The rise of this dynamic tracks with the decline of labor unions, which helped keep the gap between workers and executives in check.

Unions, and the structured, equitable pay scales across companies that they advocated for, Steinbaum says, were especially crucial for large companies like General Motors, which employed thousands of workers across all different functions. When the tech boom began to take off, unions and wage standards felt less urgent for companies that could be run out of a single room by a handful of people on computers. But Amazon’s days as a tech company are long past: Today, Steinbaum says, it represents the modern interpretation of the manufacturing companies that kept working-class people afloat with decent salaries and working conditions–only it’s often cut corners on fulfilling those criteria.

“What’s interesting about Silicon Valley–and I’m including Amazon, even though they’re not technically Silicon Valley–is that those companies have attained a position of great power in the U.S. economy with relatively little in the way of labor market policies because they employ very few workers relative to what companies in similar positions of power would’ve employed in pervious eras,” Steinbaum says. That’s allowed tech companies to focus on hiring relatively few people at high salaries (while contracting out roles like janitor and cafeteria worker, which were once full-time company jobs, to cut costs, which is a separate but related issue). While their role in U.S. culture might be large, their share of the labor market is still fairly small.

Amazon, though, morphed away from that model long ago. It now employs over 250,000 workers year-round, across all its operations, and annually hires 100,000 seasonal workers for the holidays. It’s not a tech company: It’s a tech, operations, logistics, distribution company. “You can’t really operate a business like that unless you have a pay structure more traditionally associated with large, dominant corporations,” Steinbaum says. “That Amazon is now setting a company-specific minimum wage is evidence of its changing character as a company.”

But having said that, Steinbaum adds, “We shouldn’t view this as a sort of natural phenomenon that sort of sprung out of the evolution of the company for random reasons–it’s definitely related to current political pressures.” Not only have there been scores of articles about conditions at fulfillment centers and union-busting tactics within the company, but the search for the company’s second headquarters has highlighted the power the company holds as it demands concessions from cities in exchange for the promise of new jobs. “There’s no way for the company to escape the public eye and the vicissitudes of politics,” Steinbaum says, “and that matters a great deal for wages and other factors of the company.”

That Amazon implemented the $15 minimum wage only after such pressure demonstrates that the company, first and foremost, still wishes to be seen as a tech company, and not a giant corporation akin to its mid-century predecessors; it could also indicate that Amazon really just didn’t believe it needed to pay its people more. As such, the price for the new wage floor is that Amazon is no longer offering long-term warehouse workers stock options. There’s an argument to be made that swapping out stock for a minimum wage may actually save the company money–Amazon’s stock has been booming of late. But if the company were truly invested in worker financial outcomes, they could continue to offer both–and let their workforce unionize to collectively bargain for such benefits.

But shortcomings aside, Steinbaum does not want to minimize the enormity of Amazon’s decision to shift to a $15 minimum wage. Amazon, after Walmart, is the second-largest employer in the U.S. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not budged since 2009. By setting their own minimum wage of $15–which several states and employers have already done–Amazon will be creating a major wage lift for many people, and sending a signal to Washington. (As part of its forthcoming wage floor, Amazon has said that it will employ a public policy team to lobby for a higher federal minimum wage.) While the push for higher minimum wage laws will meet with resistance under the current government in Washington, what Amazon’s decision makes clear is that the companies who employ the majority of Americans have the financial resources to see it through, and now they have a pretty significant precedent.

I’m one of those people that can’t do all or nothing. I once tried to eliminate all sugar and carbs from my diet, only to go on a bagel and potato chips binge a week later. Then there’s the time I tried to do a digital detox on vacation. I lasted half a day.

That’s because I’m a “moderator.” When I allow myself a tiny amount of sugar and carbs every day, my urge for them quickly disappears. But for our guest on this week’s episode of Secrets Of The Most Productive People, she has to give up sugar altogether. She couldn’t fathom how I can have a big chocolate bar on my desk and have the “self-control” to eat no more than one small square a day.

When it comes to making or breaking habits–there is no one-size-fits-all solution. As best-selling author Gretchen Rubin tells us, it all comes down to how you respond to expectations. Are you driven by having to answer to someone else? Do you need tons of data and research that tell you why you need to take a particular course of action? Are you allergic to societal “norms” and value independence to do whatever you want, whenever you want?

No one is “good” or “bad” at building habits. Every person just needs to figure out the strategies that work for them. Listen to our conversation with Rubin on what some of those tips might be, along with why certain personality types don’t do well with accountability partners. You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Last Saturday it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a proposed settlement with Musk over tweets he sent about taking Tesla private. As part of that settlement, Musk will pay a $20 million fine and step down as Tesla’s Chairman for three years. But the New York Times reports that the SEC offered Musk an even better, “extraordinarily generous,” settlement–but Musk turned it down. That settlement would have required Musk to only resign as chairman for two years and required a much smaller fine. As the Times reports:

It was a stunning reversal: The board had rejected a settlement that was extraordinarily generous — it would have allowed Mr. Musk to remain as chief executive, and required him to step down as chairman for only two years. Now, the company was at risk of losing Mr. Musk as chairman and chief executive if regulators prevailed in court.

But Musk threatened to resign on the spot if the board accepted the SEC’s offer. The board acquiesced and told the SEC there would be no settlement. Yet the next day, Tesla was back at the SEC “groveling” for another settlement offer, the Times says. They were there in part due to the fact that Tesla’s stock plunged 14% on the news of the original rejected settlement.

In the end, both Tesla and Musk will now have to pay the SEC a $20 million fine and Musk must resign as chairman of Tesla for three years. The company must also now appoint two independent directors and elect an independent director as chairman.

Tencent Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Chinese tech giant Tencent, has filed paperwork with the SEC announcing its plans to go public in the U.S. Under the plans, Tencent Music Entertainment will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “TME.” It will reportedly seek to raise $1 billion in the offering, reports Axios.

Tencent Music currently has about 800 million unique monthly users in China. Those users stream over 70 minutes of music a day each. The company says it’s profitable, making $263 million in profit on revenues of $1.3 billion for the first six months of the year. TME is estimated to be worth about $12 billion in total.

Currently, Tencent Music is not available to U.S. customers and TME made no suggestions it will become available in the U.S., where Apple Must and Spotify already dominate the streaming music market. No date has yet been set for its IPO.

But don’t worry, the president hasn’t gone mad and launched a nuclear missile strike. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is simply conducting a nationwide test of its Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system,reports USAToday. The WEA is essentially the cellular device version of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) that is broadcast to radios and TVs.

In a statement alerting people to the test, FEMA said, “The purpose of the test is to ensure that EAS and WEA are both effective means of warning the public about emergencies, particularly those on the national level.” So at 2:18 p.m. if you have your cell phone turned on and you are within range of an active cell tower, and your wireless provider participates in the WEA system, you’ll receive the following message:

Presidential Alert: THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.

The message will appear only once and once you receive it you can safely dismiss it–this time. Future WEA alerts will be for real, however. They can be issued for anything from missing children to hazardous weather, or even allow the president a new way to address the nation during a national emergency.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to a trio of scientists. Sir Gregory Winter, from Britain, and Americans Frances Arnold and George Smith.

BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the #NobelPrize in Chemistry 2018 with one half to Frances H. Arnold and the other half jointly to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter. pic.twitter.com/lLGivVLttB

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2018

This year’s Chemistry Laureates have taken control of evolution and used the same principles – genetic change and selection – to develop proteins that solve humankind’s chemical problems. #NobelPrizepic.twitter.com/rDKc2YwLgb

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2018

Arnold, from the California Institute of Technology, is receiving the prestigious award for her work on the directed evolution of enzymes. The Academy explained that “enzymes produced through directed evolution are used to manufacture everything from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.”

Frances Arnold, awarded the 2018 #NobelPrize, conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, which are proteins that catalyse chemical reactions. Enzymes produced through directed evolution are used to manufacture everything from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.@francesarnoldpic.twitter.com/TGRxgjEHzv

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2018

Smith and Winter garnered the award for their work on the phage display of peptides and antibodies, that can be used to counteract autoimmune diseases and cure metastatic cancer as well as produce new pharmaceuticals.

2018 #NobelPrize laureate George Smith developed a method known as phage display, where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria – can be used to evolve new proteins. pic.twitter.com/roX8uOFICe

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2018

Sir Gregory Winter, awarded the #NobelPrize in Chemistry, has used phage display to produce new pharmaceuticals. Today phage display has produced antibodies that can neutralise toxins, counteract autoimmune diseases and cure metastatic cancer. pic.twitter.com/p5fOfo0DwJ

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2018

A recent trip to the airport showed me the future of design.

The waiting area at the gate was chaos. Luggage sprawled everywhere, everyone looking into their phones, competing lines to get onto the plane, boarding groups becoming one. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably experienced it many times. As a designer, I always look at these things and think: There has to be a better way.

In the midst of this, I noticed a grandmother by the windows. She’d created a little fort out of a couple of suitcases and a blanket. What looked to be her grandchildren were happily playing. And then some other kids joined them, and suddenly the parents of all the children were smiling and chatting. It was totally bizarre, and also, the loveliest airport scene ever. Those people actually all wanted to be there. They weren’t waiting like the rest of us, they were playing.

It made me wonder how we might create that kind of airport—an airport where we all enjoy the moment and feel connected. What if a grandmother were to design an airport?

I imagine that she would be more likely to imagine ideas that could truly transform airports. She might, for example, be more inclined to consider the needs of each generation. She might value some qualities, such as compassion or relationship-making, over others, while being creative with constraints. She might reference the range of people she’s met, the stories she’s heard, the experiences she’s learned over the years.

You’ve probably already guessed that this story isn’t really about grandmothers. It’s about changing who generates the ideas in design, and who has the voice and power to contribute to decision-making. It’s about the lessons we can learn from grandmothers: How we bring the fullness of the human experience to every moment. It’s about freeing ourselves from the idea that design leaders need to be authoritative and instead should act as community organizers who elevate others. Great design will emerge from the intersection of ideas, experiences, and identities. Less machismo, and more feminism. A focus on innovation and transformation. An emphasis on optimism, empathy, and adaptability. More inclusion at the proverbial table, and then, questioning if power should even come from a seat there.

There are some compelling recent examples. Think of the Women’s March, which was designed to be inclusive at different scales–from welcoming various identities to providing shelter for breastfeeding parents. There’s Coinbase designer Connie Yang, who’s trying to make cryptocurrency accessible and tangible. There are also countless female-founded startups that are seeing opportunities–from tampon subscription services to new financial planning models–that others have ignored. What underlie their designs are 10 key behavioral shifts:

1. From a focus on few to the inclusion of many
2. From focusing on functionality to embracing beauty
3. From self-protection to vulnerability
4. From top-down dictation to all-around collaboration
5. From reliance on reason to consideration of intuition
6. From designing for profits to designing for purpose
7. From taking credit to amplifying voices
8. From rigidity to adaptability
9. From protection of status to advocacy for others
10. From acting with fear to leading with love

These 10 shifts will enable the next generation to be, not just design leaders, but designers of leadership. The shifts may feel at odds with the status quo. They may change with time. But they suggest new models of power, of working, and of seeing potential in others and the world—new ways to lead in the future of design.

Jessica Tillyer is managing creative director of SYPartners.

Welcome to being a working woman in the 2010s, where the gender pay gap, scant leadership representation, and negotiation backlash—not to mention #metoo and #timesup—are common workplace land mines. Be sure you regulate your composure so you’re not too “abrasive.” Also, we’re going to need you to do your part for workplace culture by acting as a sounding board, taking notes during meetings and sending us a recap email, ordering pizza when we work late, and planning office events and birthday parties. Oh, and be sure to clean up the kitchen when you’re done.

In the September 2017 article, “Women Aren’t Nags. We’re Just Fed Up,” writer Gemma Hartley sparked a national conversation about the disparity in emotional labor among spouses and partners. But emotional labor also exists in the workplace—and it disproportionately affects women.

Caretaking in the office

The concept isn’t new. The 1983 book The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild, which was reissued in 2012, kicked off the scholarly conversation about emotional labor, says communication expert Celeste Headlee, author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. Emotional labor in its original context meant “surface acting,” or managing emotions to make people around you comfortable. So that may mean putting on a smile in a service job, no matter how you’re feeling. It may mean watching tone in communication, or acting in ways that reinforce prescribed norms.

Diversity consultant Megan Eiss-Proctor, founder and CEO of Heddy Consulting, recalls an instance where a single email message she sent to her team triggered a 45-minute feedback session during which she says her supervisor criticized the tone of her email, which had offended a male colleague.

Eiss-Proctor says the situation was frustrating because she had taken great pains to introduce an agenda to better organize meetings and spent time thinking about the best way to frame the email so that it didn’t come across as too pushy. “And the only way to adjust was to essentially cede my power almost entirely with the suggestion he gave me, which was, ‘You draft it, and then you send it to me, and then I’ll send it from me, and he will feel better about it,'” she says.

The costs of emotional labor

To meet expectations, women often take on many of the daily culture-building and housekeeping tasks, Headlee says. “It includes not only the expectation that women are supposed to take care of emotional needs, but any social activities in the workplace,” Headlee says. “We’re also talking about the extra emotional labor that women have to go through in order to be smiling at work, in order to live up to the expectations of how we’re supposed to behave when we are at work.”

But all of that smiling and taking care of others takes time and energy. And it’s not helping you advance, says pay equity expert Katie Donovan, founder of the consultancy Equal Pay Negotiations, LLC. Donovan works as a coach with mostly women executives and complaints about emotional labor are common. “This stuff isn’t helping us move up the corporate ladder because no one cares about it,” she says. Plus, she says, it’s taking time away from the high-value work that can help women move into leadership roles, not to mention that you may need to put in extra time just to make up for that which was lost.

A previous Fast Company article by Eric Jaffe found that when women violate the behaviors expected of them, they’re often punished. If she’s expected to be compassionate and instead acts forcefully, she’s more likely to be labeled “brusque” or “uncaring” instead of “decisive.” The piece also found that:

• Women who succeed in male domains are disliked
• Women who promote themselves are less hirable
• Women who negotiate for higher pay are penalized
• Women who express anger are given lower status

It’s a dangerous cycle, says Leah Sheppard, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Management, Information Systems, and Entrepreneurship at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

“It’s hard to know exactly where the problem stems from. Is it that women are somehow just more likely to agree to these things or volunteer for these things? Are they more likely to be asked? There is some literature that might suggest that it’s both,” she says.

But opting out may have consequences. According to one 2005 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, when women and men behave altruistically at work, men are given outsize accolades for doing so. But when women don’t step up and go the extra mile, they’re judged more harshly.

Redistributing the caretaking

It’s time to release women from workplace housekeeping and caretaking roles. Some remedies are so simple that they seem silly, but they work. “As depressing as this may be, you have to make a task wheel, the exact same way as if you had children,” Headlee says. Company leaders and managers need to get involved and make sure that the distribution of this extra work—from planning corporate activities to making the morning coffee—is being shouldered by everyone.

“Once you get a little awareness, it’s a like taking a red pill and unplugging from The Matrix. I think part of it is getting to see a different world that we’re not seeing before. We are fish swimming in sexist waters. When you pull us out of this medium, and you see what you’ve been swimming in, it’s a revelation. It can be quite empowering to not just the women but also to the men to realize what’s going on, and also to give them the tools that they need to show respect to their female coworkers,” Headlee says.

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

As successful baby boomers reach retirement age, plenty of them express frustration with kids today, especially millennials—those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s.

Foremost among the young adults’ sins is their seeming inability to support themselves:

“Those kids need to develop a work ethic and save—penny by penny, like their parents and grandparents did.”

“One day they might be able to move out of their parents’ basement or even—hallelujah—buy a home of their own.”

But how soft and spoiled can young adults really be as they wrestle with historic levels of student debt, incomes that often pale in comparison to the basic costs of living—especially housing—and future prospects that appear greatly diminished compared to those of earlier generations? Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California demographer who focuses on generations and immigration, says that millennials’ critics have it backward: The people who have “enjoyed enormous advantages” throughout their lives, the baby boomers, are the truly entitled generation.

Boomers, who made up the largest generation in U.S. history at the time, poured into the job market in the 1960s amid a wave of postwar prosperity when the country was at peak influence and wealth relative to the world. For many in that generation, the benefits came in a river of opportunity: cheap education, job security, paid vacation time, low-cost healthcare and lifelong pensions. Childcare and housing were remarkably affordable to most people. The result: juiced-up social mobility for tens of millions of Americans.

In many parts of California, a single salary in a typical job—teaching, policing, firefighting, construction, or even gardening—could support a family and even pay off a home mortgage. Back then, working people commonly bought homes near where they worked for two times the typical annual household salary. In today’s costly market, buyers generally fork out close to eight times the median household income, signaling a huge de facto devaluation of work.

So while boomers, perhaps understandably, hype the hard work they put in to succeed, Myers says that to a certain extent, “They were simply born at the right time.”

Bad timing?

America’s millennials–nearly 80 million strong–may have been born at the wrong time.

In California, births for their generation peaked around 1990. For many, their earliest collective memory is of the 9/11 attacks. They entered the professional world in the shadow of the Great Recession. Now largely in their twenties, their growing demand for very limited housing is a primary driver of California home prices. That is likely to continue for at least a few more years as the greatest number of millennials will turn 30 in 2020. Since migration to California from other states has turned negative, as has international migration, the coming years may well represent peak demand on the housing front, says Myers.

If millennials are the trigger for the housing shortage, then policy makers largely elected by boomers may be one of the main causes. Their own entry into the housing market in the 1970s drove a sustained surge in home prices in California.

Rather than respond with an enduring construction boom to keep housing inventory affordable, the state downshifted—implementing rules, laws, and ballot measures that collectively would make it impossible to add enough housing to satisfy demand. Restrictions prevented the addition of many units around single-family homes and the replacement of many homes with apartment complexes.

Income and property tax policies were also put into place that, however unintentionally, privileged early-arriving homeowners over others, encouraging more people to buy and creating more demand that, in turn, drove up prices. One such measure was Proposition 13, which amended the state constitution by a popular vote in 1978 and granted people who owned homes at the time permanent reductions in property taxes. Officially titled, The People’s Initiative To Limit Property Taxation, Prop. 13 means that a homeowner who bought in the cheap real estate market of the 1970s or earlier might now pay 10¢ in property tax for every dollar a recent buyer of a similar nearby house pays.

One effect is that longtime property owners, including many boomers, or their inheritors enjoyed the benefits after Prop. 13 shifted their collective tax burden largely toward generation X and now, on millennials as they entered a much more expensive real estate market and were taxed accordingly.

Slacking on building

California’s current housing crisis was delayed during the 1990s due to a saving grace of sorts. Generation X, which is sandwiched between the boomers and millennials, was so small that their search for a place to live didn’t aggravate the housing shortage much.

But a common-sense look at population growth at the time should have triggered policy makers to alter tax, construction, and regulatory policies to facilitate an ongoing home-construction binge in urban California, especially as millennials began to reach adulthood in the 2000s.

There was what passed for a large wave of construction that decade—some analysts at the time even feared a glut, but they weren’t looking far enough ahead. And regardless, the miniature-building boom was cut short by the massive economic downturn (sparked largely by a speculation in the housing market) that began in 2008. Construction ground to a halt.

A decade later, while it might seem that enormous steel cranes have become California’s new state bird, home construction still doesn’t come close to matching the natural increase in housing demand among residents. Myers says that for every two apartments or homes California currently builds, it should be constructing five to satisfy the state’s millennial-driven needs.

In recent years, Randy Shaw, the founder of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in San Francisco, has been struck by the depth and breadth of the housing crisis he has seen in the Bay Area and beyond as the real estate market exploded.

It led him to write Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The book, which will be published in November, focuses on a young generation that largely cannot dream of affording life in America’s dynamic urban centers, even through renting. “The victims,” says Shaw in an interview, “are millennials, and the boomers don’t care.”

That may be due to the enormous profits many longtime homeowners earn when they cash out their homes. Shaw says people want to believe that the housing crisis is just something that happens based on “forces beyond their control.” But the enemy of affordable housing, he says, is often those very homeowners—not because they sell, but because they have often spent years advocating policies that make housing so unaffordable for others.

According to Dartmouth economics professor William Fischel’s Homevoter Hypothesis, homeowners have such a clear financial interest in keeping their communities up and their own property taxes down that they organize to carry outsized weight with local government.

The personal financial aspect of their efforts is not always explicit. So in places like urban or coastal California, homeowners may work against the construction of more housing for reasons ranging from aesthetics, environmentalism and nostalgia for ranch-style homes, to fear of traffic and the people who live in apartments. Their weapons include supporting zoning requirements, testifying at hearings, petitions, political pressure and lawsuits, or threats to file them.

But consciously or not, if boomers help to limit the construction of new housing, they are helping to make sure that their own homes become more valuable in a constricted market.

An irony, Shaw points out, is that many such people are acting against their oft-stated political beliefs, especially in places like Berkeley (where Shaw lives), a city whose residents’ social justice bent is legendary, although many also have a profound anti-development streak. “A part of the gentrification dynamic that hasn’t gotten enough attention,” says Shaw, “is that people can be progressive or liberal on other issues, but not on housing.”

Laura Clark is a millennial on the front lines of what is becoming a generational war over housing. The blunt-talking Clark struggled with the cost of housing in the Bay Area herself before becoming the head of a pro-housing construction movement called Yes In My Backyard, or YIMBY Action. The advocacy group, which claims 1,800 mostly millennial members, focuses laser-like on loosening restrictions and generating enough rental housing to make it affordable for people who earn old-school, middle-class salaries in the region.

Clark points to polls showing large majorities of people in the Bay Area supporting the construction of housing—as long as it isn’t in their neighborhoods. “People always say housing should be built in that mythical Somewhere Else, and that ‘somewhere’ ends up being nowhere.”

The result? “They are stunting an entire generation and [collectively] blocking housing for millions of people,” she says.

She hopes demographic change is on the side of millennials and others who are being left out. “I hope there are enough millennials in the basement saying, ‘Hey mom, we need more housing so I can move out,'” Clark says.

Comeuppance?

In generational terms, millennials can be forgiven for feeling like earlier generations have set them up for an epic fall. But, Myers says, millennials may be well-positioned to seek—and obtain—a measure of comeuppance.

That’s because they are primed to become the largest swath of the electorate, meaning that they are increasingly capable of throwing their electoral weight around. Already, their confluence of interests with developers and relevant labor unions seem to be generating activity in state capitals such as Sacramento, to reduce or eliminate limitations on the construction of housing, particularly along rail lines.

But regardless of a direct electoral confrontation between aging boomers and rising millennials, home-owning boomers may face unexpected demographic trouble in the housing market down the road. After all, boomers and the home-owning survivors of the “Greatest Generation” that preceded them own more than half of all homes.

Myers says that as boomers reach their eighties—the age when people often sell their homes (as they downsize into smaller houses closer to their adult children or enter senior care centers)—they may discover they have waited too long.

The reason: Many millennials, weighed down by debt and lesser incomes, may have moved away from coastal cities in search of a more affordable life, or they won’t have been able to save enough to buy the costly homes of boomers.

Current trends suggest that migration from other parts of the country or abroad might not fill the gap either. So fewer people able to buy homes could translate into too much supply—and a big drop in home values.

“Now there is a shortage of inventory, in the future there will be an excess—unless we change things,” says Myers. “Ultimately, there is a day of reckoning coming . . . Who will buy their house? Young people? . . . My valuable house is only valuable when I sell it.”

The safe options, he says, are either to sell it now, or for society to invest in the next generation so they can prosper—and then buy boomers’ homes when the time comes.

He pauses for effect. “I think that the older folks haven’t thought that through.”

Each weekday, after work and just before dark, there is a small window during which—as a candidate for a House seat in Connecticut’s state legislature—I have a precious few hours to knock on doors and introduce myself to voters.

It isn’t uncommon for me to have my 3-year-old daughter, Parker, in tow. The reason: I can’t always afford a babysitter.

Don’t get me wrong—Parker is adorable and has probably helped me win a vote or two. But when she is with me, I can’t help but be distracted. By the time we walk hand-in-hand up steps that are seemingly endless to a preschooler, I am able to greet about half as many voters as I can when she isn’t forced to tag along. In retail politics, that’s a very high cost.

Like most working parents, I rely on a patchwork of childcare options: pre-kindergarten and after-school care when my husband and I are at work, family and friends when they’re available to pitch in, and babysitters for an occasional night out.

But campaigning is like having a second full-time job. It requires long hours in the evenings and on weekends to connect with voters and attend community meetings and public events.

That’s why, like other candidates across the country who also happen to be moms, I’m fighting for the right to use campaign funds to cover childcare expenses when I’m on the trail.

This summer, I petitioned Connecticut’s State Election and Enforcement Commission to use public campaign funds in this way. They said no.

I’m appealing the decision because I know I’ll need more childcare help in the final months of my race. But this isn’t just about me; there is something much bigger at stake. We can’t have equity in our society if we don’t have it among our elected officials. If my appeal is successful, it sets a precedent for all candidates, regardless of gender, and then hopefully becomes law.

Childcare, of course, is needed by men as well as women. Yet research shows that working moms spend nearly double the amount of time caring for their children that working dads do—an average of 14 hours a week compared with eight hours. Clearly, the burden of watching the kids or finding a suitable caregiving arrangement often falls on women who work, leaving all too many with terrible choices.

In certain zip codes across the country, there are so few daycare centers that some experts have started calling these areas “childcare deserts.” Meanwhile, where care is available, it is often exorbitant, outstripping the combined cost of what households spend on food and transportation and, in a majority of states, even the expense of housing and tuition at a public college. Indeed, childcare in the U.S. is among the highest-priced in the world.

The upshot is that millions of working mothers have had to quit a job, not take a job, or substantially change their job because of childcare problems.

Keeping well-qualified, productive women out of the labor force in this way is bad for the economy and for society.

But it’s particularly harmful when a lack of childcare is an obstacle for those of us trying to assume public office. Working moms with young children like me promise to bring an important—and largely overlooked—perspective to the political arena.

We understand, in the most personal way, the need for policies that promote early childhood education, affordable healthcare, resources for children with exceptionalities, pay equity, a woman’s right to choose, earned family medical leave—and, yes, affordable, high-quality childcare.

But we can’t elect more moms to local, state, and national office unless our laws—campaign and otherwise—adequately support them and their families. We have to provide opportunities for non-wealthy candidates to enter and compete on a level playing field in electoral politics.

Helping to lead the charge is Liuba Grechen Shirley, a congressional candidate from New York, and the mother of two small children. She recently persuaded the Federal Election Commission to let her use campaign funds for childcare. The decision, she said, was “a game changer.”

Unfortunately, the federal ruling does not apply to the thousands of women who are competing for state and local office. It has, however, opened the door—albeit with mixed results.

Women candidates in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, and Wisconsin have successfully petitioned state regulators to allow them to use campaign funds to cover childcare costs. In Iowa and my state, Connecticut, we’ve been turned down. And in New York and Massachusetts, two bills that would have changed the laws to allow parents to use campaign funds for childcare have been stalled.

No matter what happens on the childcare front, this is already a historic year for women in politics. A record number of us are vying for elected office, propelled largely by the misogynist-in-chief in the White House.

But what is also notable, if less buzzed about, is the degree to which so many women candidates are embracing motherhood.

Zephyr Teachout, the 46-year-old who just lost her bid to be New York attorney general, campaigned while pregnant and launched an ad featuring her getting an ultrasound exam. Two gubernatorial candidates, Krish Vignarajah of Maryland and Kelda Roy of Wisconsin, have both run ads that featured them breastfeeding their infant daughters.

And Jennifer Wexton, a congressional candidate, just launched a new ad tracking her career—and her kids sitting in carpool over the years. “As a prosecutor I put criminals in jail during the day,” she says in the opening voiceover “and changed diapers at night.”

Without a doubt, the “pink wave” is coming, and plenty of us moms are proud to be part of it. I just wish that I had more of a choice as to whether to bring my little girl along for the ride, especially when it’s past her bedtime.

Caitlin Clarkson Pereira is a Democratic candidate running for the 132nd House District in Fairfield, Connecticut.

DuPont is an important company that’s impossible to love. A new logo and identity system designed by global branding firm Lippincott aims to help, redesigning the company’s machined logo from 1909 into a curvier–and perhaps more likable–mark that recalls a football, fish, or mouth, depending on how you look at it. “It’s a very familiar shape that’s also welcoming,” says Brendán Murphy, senior partner at Lippincott.

And DuPont needs to be more welcoming. The company, which merged with Dow in 2017, is known for bringing the world bullet-stopping Kevlar and HIV-thwarting Tyvek, but it’s also been embroiled in 14 years of controversy since 2004, when it emerged that the company knew about carcinogens in its popular material Teflon for decades, along with Dow’s continued production of a pesticide deemed unsafe for children by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2017 it paid $671 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits over the toxic chemical C-8 in Teflon. Following the legal and social backlash, the mega company DowDuPont announced its split into three separate companies last February–one chemical company for its agriculture line known as Corteva Agriscience, a second chemical and material sciences company known as Dow, and a third, product-innovations arm that owns Tyvek and Kevlar, that gets to keep the namesake, DuPont. (A fourth company called Chemours, which spun out of Dupont in 2015, now owns and produces Teflon itself.)

“[We wanted] to signal this transformation of the company into something very different than perhaps what people remember us for than in the past,” says Barbara Pandos, chief communications officer, Specialty Products Division of DowDuPont.

After over 100 years of the same logo, it was time for a rebrand anyway. But exactly how much to update the century-old logo wasn’t entirely clear. With Lippincott, the company began examining a wide range of rebranding options, from not updating at all to radically transforming the look of the company.

“Recently, we did a survey, and most corporations are changing their branding roughly every seven years. They have a seven-year itch. Companies like Uber are changing even more often. A lot of the startups, as they go from newborn to adolescent to adults are really trying to find a way, and they often try to find a way through logo changes,” says Murphy. “It’s a different situation for an established brand. We have equity in the market. The challenge with a heritage brand like this is, how do you take all that positive equity, but get people to look at it with fresh eyes?”

What Lippincott created looks somehow bolder and friendlier at the same time–my own sentiment with which Murphy fully agrees–and it retains its retro flourish through carefully spruced-up typography. The boldness stems from a thicker weight on the redrawn glyphs. The approachability comes from letterforms that made their way through three separate typographers, each of whom tried to whittle away at the industrial look by mixing up curves and thicknesses. “It’s idiosyncratic in its expression, but that’s also what makes it human,” says Murphy. By breaking up the oval shape, DuPont wants to broadcast its increased commitment to “a collaborate and open flow of ideas and innovation,” according to Pandos. And it “wanted to tell a story by taking that outer ring out,” Murphy explains.

Of course, what that commitment to open ideas and innovation really means from a company responsible for a chemical that is now in the blood of 99% of people in the U.S. is anyone’s guess, leading a skeptic to see the rebranding as less DuPont turning over some new leaf, and more of a redoubled commitment to appearing more transparent while doing business as usual–albeit through a far more complicated corporate structure. When I float this perspective to Pandos, she, naturally, disagrees.

“There’s always going to be those who will gravitate to that kind of rationale, but at the end of the day, what we’re hoping is that it will invite customers and stakeholders to learn more about who DuPont, in the future, will be,” she says. “I do think it’s true and authentic that we are transforming, and the logo reflects that as well.”

This post was updated to reflect the fact that Dupont and Dow no longer own or make Teflon.

I’m walking through Mount Sinai Health System’s library on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by medical students studying and furiously clacking on their keyboards. My destination? A classroom in the corner of the library that’s marked only by a small sign that says “Lab100.” I step out of the library’s fluorescent light into a clean, bright space that’s a far cry from a drab doctor’s office, with screens on every wall, transparent dividers cordoning off different machines, and midcentury furniture.

The corner of a medical school library is a rather unlikely place to put the clinic of the future, but for now, it’s the staging area for Lab100–an experimental clinic that provides patients with one of the most complete health assessments currently available (and a finalist in the 2018 Innovation by Design awards), from cognition and balance to body composition and dexterity.

However, 40% of premature deaths are caused by lifestyle choices. And this is where Lab100 is focusing–connecting everyday behaviors with conventional medicine, shifting health care’s emphasis on treating disease toward preventing disease in the first place. Lab100 intends to show patients how their lifestyle choices impact their health in a more granular way, connecting the two to answer questions like, “How will cooking at home impact my overall health, from my focus to my balance to my body composition?” With patients’ consent, they can also contribute their health data to larger studies happening at the hospital.

“This is really aiming to give you a more quantitative picture of where you fall on the health continuum,” says Dr. David Stark, Lab100’s creator and director. “The goal being that we empower you to make your own lifestyle changes.”

Blood tests, body scans, and a VR headset

To understand the thinking behind Lab100, I decided to try it for myself, arriving at the Lab on a sunny morning in September.

It all starts in a classroom in the medical library. After arriving, the first step of the assessment was to pose for a photo that would be attached to the rest of the health data the team would collect on me that morning. Even this simple step had rationale behind it: according to Stark, studies have shown that attaching a photo to an electronic medical record can reduce the number of errors people make when entering data. In other words, it makes you more than just a line on a spreadsheet.

But taking photos of everyone who comes through Lab100 supports a larger research goal as well. “We can actually extract computational features–the texture of your skin to the color to other small blemishes, things you can’t see with naked eye–and use statistical machine learning algorithms to correlate or relate those features to other health relevant metrics,” Stark says before he snaps a photo of me. “The hope is that a camera embedded in your bathroom mirror or elsewhere in the home could help to more passively predict health issues before they manifest clinically.”

Each one of Lab100’s tests has this combination: it has a practical impact right now, both for the patient and the medical system, and it can contribute to more speculative research in the future. Even the very standard practice of collecting your vital signs–temperature and blood pressure–is aimed at improving the broader medical health system by streamlining how this basic data that every doctor needs is collected. Usually, medical professionals take your vital signs and write them on slips of paper to later transcribe into a computer. But Stark and his team integrated the vital signs equipment with Lab100’s technical backend so that it’s automatically uploaded to the cloud.

As he takes my blood pressure, Stark tells me that when a group of hospital executives toured the space recently, they were most excited about the idea of using the machines’ APIs to upload directly to the internet, reducing the time people have to spend inputting data and reducing errors. “When people ask what is the technology in Lab100 that’s most impactful today, they think I’m going to say deep learning or convolutional neural networks,” Stark says. “The brutal reality is that it’s simple APIs that let us integrate the data that we collect.”

Next, I had my blood drawn and analyzed using a machine that NASA astronauts use to monitor their health in space–instead of taking a week or more for a lab to finish the text, it’s done in only 30 minutes. I had a full body scan; I completed a series of simple tasks meant to test my attention, flexibility, processing speed, memory, and vocabulary; I put a bunch of pins into a series of holes as quickly as I could to measure dexterity; I put on a VR headset that visualized how hard I was gripping a handheld device to test my strength; and I completed a group of balance exercises in front of a Kinect motion tracker with an iPod strapped to my waist.

Some of the machines that conducted these tests can be found at high-end gyms; others are state of the art neurological tests; and some are more experimental, like the balance test. Stark is actively prototyping the Kinect as a diagnostic tool right now.

“The reason for that is that technology is going to be embedded in every television set in every living room in the next three to five years,” he says. “So we’re doing research here to say, can we non-invasively and passively measure balance, gait, and gross motor function in elderly adults or adults at risk in their home?”

For some of the approximately 200 people who have gone through Lab100 so far, the test’s balance results proved the biggest surprise. Stark says that many older adults who are generally very healthy are shocked to find that their balance is suboptimal–partially because it’s not something primary care physicians test for in an in-depth way. “It turns out your balance can suffer and you don’t know about it until you have that first fall,” Stark says. “That’s problematic because that first fall can be the one that lands you in the hospital with a hip fracture.”

A more complete picture of my health

Once I finished the assessments, Stark laid out all of my results on a giant screen, using data visualizations to show how I measure up to what’s considered average for my age, gender, race, and ethnicity.

The visualizations also include information from detailed surveys I filled out, before even stepping through Lab100’s door, on my diet, sleep, and exercise patterns. During my assessment, I learned that my ratio of body fat to muscle and bone was elevated–though that wasn’t a complete surprise, given that I’d just come back from a trip. The one area I was off the charts? Vocabulary, which wasn’t a surprise either given my profession as a writer.

But the entire experience was unlike any interaction with a doctor I’d ever had–and I’d never seen the current state of my health laid out in such a visual, easy-to-understand manner.

I’m generally healthy, but many of the people who’ve come through Lab100 since it opened in private beta last October have chronic diseases like diabetes or hypertension (anyone who’s interested can sign up for an assessment via the lab’s website). But the impact of seeing your health metrics visualized was powerful for them as well. “By and large when they come in they already know they have these issues,” Stark says. “What they’re telling us is that this is the first time they’ve seen how all of these factors link together and they’re seeing it presented to them onscreen and explained as a story.”

From the clinic to the real world

This is all well and good. But bringing a small scale prototype like Lab100 to a larger audience is a daunting task, especially within the existing health care system. “We know that health care doesn’t happen when you’re in the hospital, when you’re in the clinic. It happens the other 364 days of the year when you’re out in the real world,” Stark says. “That’s why a lot of the work we’re doing is how do we scale this out of a brick and mortar clinic and put it in the real world.”

The technology inside Lab100 may end up in the real world in several different forms. The assessments and visualizations have already been integrated into other programs at Mount Sinai, like the sports medicine and rehabilitation medicine department and the neuro-performance center. Dr. Joel Dudley, the director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai–the institute that Lab100 sits within–is already working on bringing a similar version of the physical lab to other countries.

But the biggest question remains: Does seeing your complete health data presented to you in this visual way actually motivate people to change their habits and live healthier–which means they require fewer health care services in the future?

To find out, Dudley is working to prepare a pilot study at Mount Sinai, which, like other companies that insure their employees, has a great incentive to reduce its overall health insurance costs. The hospital system already encourages employees to complete a standard health and wellness test in exchange for reduced insurance premiums. If Dudley gets his way, a sample of 1,000 people at Mount Sinai will do this standard test, and another 1,000 will do Lab100. He hopes to show that Lab100’s methods show a enough of a return on investment to interest companies that are interested in keeping their employees healthier.

That could mean that Lab100 could one day be embedded inside large workplaces, where you can stop by during your lunch break and get a wellness test. Or, you could potentially find a scaled down version in a self-service kiosk at your local pharmacy, or at the gym. But the team is still figuring out the business model. When Lab100 comes out of private beta and opens to the general public later this year, it will switch to a paid model–with pricing still to be determined.

For Dudley, gathering more data on what healthy looks like is one of the more ambitious goals of the project. Because doctors are trained to perform a test only if they have a suspicion that there’s something wrong, most electronic health records are almost completely empty–which makes it hard for technologists to train machine learning algorithms and make health care more predictive. “Algorithms are way ahead of the data,” Dudley says. “We have all the algorithms we need for the next 10 years. What we need is the right data to feed into them.”

After I finished at Lab100 and went through my results with Stark, I got an email with a PDF of all the visualizations we’d discussed. I filled out a survey about my experience, which will feed back into Lab100’s efforts to make the UX of the clinic better. A vial of my blood went to Mount Sinai’s bio bank, where it will be deidentified and the DNA extracted for researchers at the hospital to use, since I consented to researchers using my anonymized Lab 100 results in other studies as well.

It’s a service model that’s virtually nonexistent elsewhere in the health care system–one that’s based on UX, data, visualizations, storytelling, and most crucially, user-centered design and consent.

“Health care is the only industry where you don’t develop products based on user feedback,” Dudley says. “If you come back in six months and it looks like this, it means we failed.”

The worst thing any brand can be is invisible.

Actually, the very worst thing any brand can be is racist. Or poisonous. Also, fatally toxic.

But besides those, invisible is as bad as it gets.

In today’s fragmented, always-on media hellscape, it’s incredibly easy to go largely unnoticed, despite churning through your marketing budget at a record pace. There’s only so much we can pay attention to. It’s why the mantra of so many brands revolves around “becoming part of culture,” “creating culture,” “bathing naked and neck-deep in the bottomless swamp of culture . . . .”

Last June, IHOP ruffled a lot of feathers when it announced that the 60-year-old restaurant chain was changing its name to IHOB and shifting its focus from pancakes to burgers. There was plenty of sneering, but ultimately the campaign increased burger sales and, even more miraculously, had people actually talking about IHOP. Thanks to flipping that p into a b, “over 20,000 media stories were generated and we had over 36 billion earned media impressions,” Darren Rebelez, president of IHOP told investors in August. “Social media mentions of IHOP generated a potential reach of over 4 billion people. Assisted by the viral impact, we saw burger sales grow by 4x and have remained constant since.”

This past week, the brand unveiled its latest stunt, a partnership with Keegan Ales on IHOPS, a pumpkin pancake stout beer. The beer is available at select bars and festivals throughout New York State in October. “After IHOB, the world was more interested in what we were saying and doing,” says IHOP’s chief marketing officer Brad Haley. “We couldn’t fall back on the old way of advertising our products, which would probably end up actually disappointing people.”

Behold, the pumpkin pancake beer you never knew you wanted. Find it at https://t.co/sUtZutdehTpic.twitter.com/8U71915ZB3

— IHOP (@IHOP) September 28, 2018

Surprisingly, the beer is not available at IHOP.

IHOPS is a promotional tool for actual IHOP products, Haley says, specifically the annual arrival of its fall-themed Cinn-a-stack pancakes. “We all knew this wasn’t going to be very newsworthy because it’s something we’ve already done for the past several years,” Haley says. “We’re just bringing it back. But in this sea of pumpkin-flavored items in the marketplace, we knew we had to do something a little bit different.”

Droga5, the brand’s agency, came up with tying the seasonal pancakes into beer and Octoberfest, seeing pancake flavors lending themselves to a really great beer. “And we completely agreed,” says Haley.

“We learned a lot from the IHOB campaign,” Haley says. “When you flip people’s expectations about something they feel like they know, and something they don’t expect to be surprised by, it creates a lot of interest. In our case, it reinforced the love that people have for [IHOP].”

Beloved legacy food brands have the luxury of taking risks, getting weird, and pushing people’s expectations. If it’s good, great! If it goes sideways, the audience isn’t completely alienated and is typically willing to give these brands the benefit of the doubt. Look no further than the successes over the past few years of Denny’s social media, or KFC’s cascade of goofy comedy (and multiple Colonels).

“Everything we do, including this partnership with Keegan Ales, there’s just a fun approach to it all,” says Haley. “The beer cap looks like a pancake, and the beer taps look like a stack of pancakes with an IHOP logo at the top.”

IHOP may look like yet another brand that’s messing with us. But it just wants to remind us how much we like it. It may be syrupy, but the results so far have been pretty sweet.

The interview went well and you felt like you had great connection with the hiring manager. When you get an email saying thanks for your interest but they’ve hired someone else, it can leave you scratching your head and asking, “Why?”

“Don’t let the communication end at this point; continue the candidate experience and learn why you were not selected, the skills you need to work on, and the ways you can improve,” says Tammy Cohen, founder  of InfoMart, a global background screening company. “A ‘post-mortem’ of an unsuccessful application can yield valuable information that will boost your chances as your job search continues.”

While there is nothing wrong with following up with a hiring manager to get specifics on why you didn’t get a job, you must make sure it is done in an appropriate fashion, says Tom Moran, CEO of the professional staffing and search firm Addison Group.

“You shouldn’t bombard the hiring manager as soon as you hear you haven’t gotten the job, but you also shouldn’t let too much time pass since you want your interview to be fresh on their mind, he says. “Several days to a week is a good rule of thumb when reaching out to schedule a follow-up conversation.”

Approach the right person

After you’ve been declined from the position, start with your main point of contact at that organization, says Jill Gugino Pante, director of the Lerner Career Services Center at University of Delaware.

“Start with a general inquiry around what skills you would need to develop to be more competitive in the field,” she says. “You may get no response as the employer may not want their feedback to be misconstrued or used against them.”

If possible, contact the hiring manager instead of the recruiter or HR representative, suggests Cohen. “Hiring managers are more likely to give a candid, knowledgeable response,” she says.

To break through the red tape, you may have to build a rapport with the interviewer or HR team member giving you feedback, says leadership coach Flame Schoeder. “They need to know that your intentions are along the lines of self-development, not retribution,” she says.

How to reach out

It’s best to ask “why” by phone, says Moran. “Some employers want to avoid email communication out of fear of legal ramifications,” he says. “Set up a call by either emailing or sending a LinkedIn message requesting a brief conversation involving feedback and constructive criticism to help your future search.”

Schoeder suggests sending this message: “I am seeking an understanding of why I was not chosen for this position. Your feedback would be valuable to me. I am open to hearing the truth, even if it is not what I want to hear. Could we set up a 15-minute call to talk about it?”

What to say on the call

Start by expressing gratitude, suggests Cohen. “Thanking the interviewer opens the conversation on a positive note,” she says. “After a pleasant introduction, focus on short, specific questions that will yield useful information on a few precise issues.”

Cohen suggests asking:

• Am I lacking specific job requirements?
• What questions did I answer well?
• Did I mention key experiences and achievements that were relevant to your business needs?
• Did I use proper interview etiquette throughout the process?

Avoid questions that are personal in nature or that might set off a legal concern. “I find that candidates who ask, ‘How can I improve?’ instead of ‘Why didn’t I get the job?’ receive a better response,” says Cohen.

If your request is declined

If the employer declines your request for feedback, don’t stop there—especially if you have been passed over for jobs more than a couple of times, says Gugino Pante.

“If you can’t get it directly from the organization that rejected you, find it from another resource and move on to the next opportunity,” she says.

Reach out to a trusted colleague, mentor, or career services coach and do a mock interview with them.

“I can typically tell in the first 10 minutes if there is an issue,” says Gugino Pante. “Many times it’s because the person is not answering the question, not providing specific examples, or focusing on the wrong parts of their background, such as personal information as opposed to professional. We all need feedback on our job search skills for self-improvement and growth.”

In the wake of a massive Facebook data breach that affected some 50 million users, Tim Cook is assuring Apple users that it could never happen to them for one very simple reason: Because Apple collects as little data on its users as possible.

In a new interview with Vice News Tonight on HBO, Cook explained that protecting data goes to the heart of Apple’s product design, and in fact the company challenges itself to collect as little as possible and then to encrypt what it does collect. By the end of the process, “even Apple can’t access it.”

While some people have noted that Apple might be able to improve its products, notably Siri, if collected more data about users, Cook disagreed, calling it a “false trade-off” and saying that “whoever’s telling you that–it’s a bunch of bunk.”

For Cook, privacy, encryption, and limited data collection aren’t just business decisions, but part of being a patriotic American.”I see privacy as central to liberty,” Cook told Vice News Tonight. “I don’t want to see it slip away. Because it’s like a part of us slipping away. I mean when I say ‘us,’ I don’t mean us Apple; I mean us as Americans.”

While Apple and Samsung are hard at work engineering sleek smartphones, the experience of charging most phones is still less than elegant. In my case, it means plugging my phone into one of several wall outlets around my house, connected to ugly power strips and a jumble of cords. It’s enough to ruin the entire feng shui of a room.

Courant, a newly launched startup, is working to give the humble phone charger a makeover. Monish Sabnani and Evan Moskal launched Courant out of a Brooklyn-based incubator called Assembly Brands that focuses on creating tech-forward consumer products. The brand makes high-end wireless charging pads that are wrapped in Italian leather for you to proudly display in your home and office. Sabnani and Moskal say they were inspired by products from the world of luxury fashion. In other words, they wanted the products to be more than just functional: They wanted consumers to covet them the way we might covet the latest “it” bag.

That’s far more expensive than other wireless chargers on the market, but Sabnani says it reflects the materials: “We’ve sourced our leather from the same Italian tannery that many luxury brands use when they make handbags,” he says. “We wanted to create something that was more than just a functional electronic device. We designed these products to look beautiful in your home.” The chargers are only available on the brand’s website right now, but will soon be available to purchase at retailers like Need Supply, Goop, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus.

Wireless charging products have been around for several years, and there are now dozens of options available from brands like Belkin, Samsung, and Mophie, starting at about $20. They generally consist of plastic stands or docks that will charge your phone upon making contact with it. Wireless charging is growing exponentially: In 2016, 144 million wireless charging devices were sold, but analysts predict this will go up to 2 billion by 2025.

What’s unique about this new form of charging is that it is a universal platform that can be used across all smartphone companies. Until this technology came along, each company used its own method: Apple used lightning cables, Android used Micros USB, and Samsung used USB C. This consolidation is a product of an organization called “Qi” which certifies charging devices by testing them for safety, compatibility with different phone companies, and energy efficiency. Qi launched back in 2011, but only became mainstream in 2017.

Next up, Sabnani and Moskal are working on the next generation of electronic charging: Far-field charging. These devices will allow you to charge several devices through the air. Since this is still an emerging technology, it’s unclear when this new device will hit the market. But one thing’s for sure. Courant’s founders will make sure it will look at home sitting next to your latest handbag or watch splurge.

There’s a glut of film festivals worldwide. Whether it’s an indie affair catering to specific cities or international industry staples like Cannes or Sundance, the film festival world is not hurting for new additions. But Nick Urbom and Mark Lieber think otherwise.

The two former media marketing guys turned live event producers have created the Infinity Film Festival, a four-day event in Beverly Hills starting November 1 that aims to bridge the gap between the tech and film industries.

“When we were communicating with our content studio partners and our technology company partners, everyone was acknowledging that content is kind of all over the place at this point but it’s very much driven by technology,” Urbom says. “We recognized that between Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, and Hollywood, we might be in a position to establish a new marketplace that celebrates story advanced by technology.”

“No matter what piece of content is created, it all starts with the story–but there are so many different technologies available,” Lieber adds. “So we want to make sure that the creative community is aware of what’s out there, and we also wanted an opportunity for the technology community to meet with the creative community.”

IFF’s programming includes 75 hours of screenings, 30 technology exhibitions, more than 100 speakers, and panels focused on blockchain, art created by algorithms, and immersive storytelling. As a presenting partner to the festival, Epic Games, the video game developer behind the smash hit Fortnite, will host the IFF Tech Lab, a training session on film and virtual production. Urbom and Lieber have also tapped several noted industry leaders, including Lucasfilm exec Vicki Dobbs Beck as the keynote speaker and 20th Century Fox’s chief technology officer Hanno Basse as chairman of the awards committee. (Fast Company is also a media partner with the Infinity Film Festival.)

Festivals like Tribeca have opened its offerings over the years to include more tech-focused programming around AR and VR storytelling. However, the difference between IFF and other festivals, Urbom say, is that IFF is thinking tech-first across the board and not as an add-on.

“Something we’ve really been working hard to accomplish is to establish a credible marketplace for content and technology,” he says. “There’s a great opportunity to create a framework where people can come and do business and buy and sell content that’s specifically geared towards all these new devices created with new devices.”