If there’s one major distinction between the Google Home Hub and other Google-powered smart displays, it’s the intent behind the gadget.

While other companies like Lenovo and JBL have put out smart displays in hopes that users will figure out what to do with them, Google had a specific goal in mind for this $150 device: It wanted to make the best digital photo frame it could–one you’d feel comfortable putting on a nightstand–while also giving it the capabilities of Google Assistant.

As a result, the Google Home Hub feels like a new kind of product, even though the current smart-displays trend started last summer with Amazon’s Echo Show. This is the hardware for which Google Photos was made, and it shows that Google actually understands why people might use a smart display in the first place.

Trying to fit in

Like other smart displays with Google Assistant, the Google Home Hub takes the brain of a Google Home speaker and augments it with a screen. Instead of just hearing the forecast when you ask about the day’s weather, you’ll see an hour-by-hour rundown. Instead of just listening to music, you can play videos from YouTube. Instead of just asking to control your light bulbs and other smart home devices, you can tap on the touchscreen to make adjustments.

Those kinds of uses, however, all seem secondary to looking at pictures from Google Photos. Whenever you leave the Google Home Hub alone for more than 10 seconds, it flips over to photo mode, showing pictures from whatever albums you’ve selected. Nearly all of your time with Google Home Hub will therefore involve looking at pictures.

The same is also true of previous Google-powered displays like the JBL Link View and Lenovo Smart Display, but the Google Home Hub makes a few deliberate changes in service of being a better photo frame.

The most notable is Google’s decision to exclude a camera, thereby increasing the odds that you’ll install the Google Home Hub in private spaces such as your bedroom. (Ditching the camera also presumably helped keep costs down.)

In the spot where a camera might be, Google instead put in a light sensor, which lets the display get cooler or warmer to match the ambiance of the room. At night, when all the lights are off, the screen fades to black and shows a clock that’s faint enough not to disrupt one’s sleep.

The mentality of blending in extends to the hardware’s design, which tries to hide everything but the screen itself. Whereas the Lenovo Smart Display is a statement piece, with a large speaker grille on the front and light wood paneling that juts out from the back, the Google Home Hub tucks its speaker into the fabric-clad base behind the display.

The Google Home Hub is not totally successful in its attempts at minimalism. The hardware design, while simple, looks sort of like a low-budget Android tablet glued to a Google Home Mini speaker. (If there are future Home Hubs, maybe they’ll trim the bezels around the display and make the screen and speaker components more cohesive.) Meanwhile, the ballyhooed “Ambient EQ” feature, which matches the display’s brightness and hue to the room’s lighting, tries a little too hard at inconspicuousness out of the box. Until you dig deep into the device’s settings in Google’s Home app and find the “auto-brightness offset” option, the display tends to be too dim for all the photos it’s showing.

There’s also no denying that the Home Hub’s audio quality is subpar by smart speaker standards, more in line with Google’s Home Mini and Amazon’s Echo Dot than the full-sized Home or Echo. While it’s sufficient for hearing answers to voice commands or waking up with some light music, it’s not going to fill the room with rich bass or crystal-clear treble.

Enter Google Photos

Previous Google-powered smart displays worked well as digital photo frames almost by accident. Lenovo, for instance, doesn’t mention Google Photos in the marketing for its own device, even though photos look better from afar on Lenovo’s 10-inch display than they do on the Google Home Hub’s 7-inch screen. Same goes for JBL’s Link View, which focuses more on audio quality with two bulbous speakers around its 8-inch screen.

Google, by contrast, knew what problem it was tackling with the Home Hub: On a given day, we might take dozens of photos, and we might share a few of them on social networks so we can bask in likes and comments. But too often, we forget about those photos soon after, and seldom think to sit down and look through them later.

The Home Hub’s ability to resurface those photos was the result of direct collaboration with the Google Photos team. To complement the new hardware, Google Photos introduced a new feature called Live Albums, which uses facial recognition to automatically update albums with pictures of specific people. You can then share those albums with other users and have them add their own photos. Ashton Udall, Google’s product lead for Home Hub, says his team drove the development of Live Albums, having realized it would complete photo frame experience.

The Home Hub also has a clever way of handling portrait-orientation photos. Instead of just surrounding a photo with black bars or a blur effect, as other smart displays do, the Home Hub finds another picture of the same place and displays both images side-by-side, creating a “then and now” effect. That feature is now available on other devices as well–including the Pixel Stand wireless charger for Google’s Pixel 3 phones–but again, it was driven by the needs of the Home Hub team.

The ecosystem play

A funny thing happens when you have a Google Home Hub, a Pixel 3 phone (with the Pixel Stand charger), and either a Chromecast or Android TV device at home. Suddenly it’s possible to have every screen filled with photos of your family members and friends, and it becomes clear that Google Photos is a powerful kind of glue in the Google ecosystem. It’s already one of Google’s most successful products–with more than 500 million users, and more than 1 billion photos and videos uploaded every day–but it could also be vital to Google’s burgeoning hardware ambitions. No other company is offering this kind of experience around photos.

Google’s competitors seem to be taking notice. I recently discovered, for instance, that Amazon’s Echo Show smart display no longer covers up your personal photos with its “trending” news headlines. Those headlines now have their own background image and alternate with your own photos in full-screen.

Perhaps more notably, Apple now has an eye on the same problem that Google has been solving. In a recent interview with Financial Times, Apple design chief Jony Ive said this:

“We have such a high-quality camera with us all the time. But it becomes irrelevant if you can’t actually enjoy the photographs you’ve taken. Even 30 years ago there was always a box somewhere containing hundreds and hundreds of photographs. So this isn’t a new problem. What is a new problem is the sheer degree, the colossal volume of memories that we have recorded, and as important as the recording is the way of enjoying what you’ve recorded, and I think that’s something that’s just an ongoing experiment, and it’s an ongoing creative project for us.”

It’s not hard to imagine Apple releasing a Siri-powered alternative to the Google Home Hub, integrating with iCloud Photo Library instead of Google Photos. But it’s also not hard to imagine Apple’s take on the idea being a high-priced alternative, like the HomePod is to the Google Home and Amazon Echo speakers. Not only does Apple favor premium hardware, it also cuts off free storage at 5GB for all iCloud data, including photos. The reason Google Photos–which is available on iPhones as well as Android devices–has become such a hit is because it can back up an unlimited quantity of photos for free. (This involves some barely noticeable compression, which you can avoid by using Google Drive storage space instead.)

The Home Hub isn’t flawless. The design could use improvement, the Ambient EQ feature needs some fine-tuning out of the box, and I’d really like to see a bigger version with better audio. It is, however, Google’s clearest attempt yet to build a device ecosystem around Google Photos. I won’t be surprised if it’s a big hit.

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested that that the Home Hub’s Ambient EQ feature can’t be adjusted. A brightness offset option is available within the Google Home app by selecting the Home Hub, opening the Device Settings menu, and opening Display settings.

When it comes to their headquarters, American tech companies tend to favor sprawling campuses with pathways, pantries, and soccer pitches designed to foster interaction among employees across different departments. For its new, reportedly $599 million home, in Shenzhen, China, internet giant Tencent tasked the architecture firm NBBJ with turning this model on its side and imbuing a 50-story skyscraper with the same collegiate-style atmosphere for 12,000 employees. Step one, says lead designer Jonathan Ward, was splitting the building into two towers and connecting them by three bridges, “so there is a conversation happening between them.” Below, a look at how the firm brought new energy—and a green sensibility—to the corporate high-rise.

1. Location

The building is in a burgeoning tech district next to Shenzhen University, on the city’s far west side—an area intended to be China’s answer to Silicon Valley. Constructed on land reclaimed from the sea, the towers were built to comply with China’s Sponge City initiative, which tackles runoff pollution and flooding by making urban landscapes more capable of filtering and holding water.

2. The Plaza and Rooftop Gardens

The building’s one-acre plaza is covered in permeable ceramic bricks made from recycled materials that filter rainwater as it drains into the ground. This absorbent layer—along with gardens atop the roofs and bridges—has more than doubled the building’s water-retention rate compared with traditional construction techniques.

3. First Bridge

Nicknamed the “brain” of the building, the top bridge houses Tencent University, where employees can take classes to brush up on skills such as coding. Several conference rooms are located here, as well as space for after-work activities, such as guitar and English lessons.

4. Second Bridge

The “heart” bridge contains more than 25,000 square feet of health and gym facilities, including a track, climbing wall, basketball court, dance studio, 2 badminton courts, 6 billiards tables, and 12 Ping-Pong tables. There’s also a juice bar.

5. Third Bridge

The lowest link contains a museum about the history of Tencent, two levels of cafeteria space, and a 500-person auditorium.

6. Bus Station

Tencent buses pick up employees throughout the city and drop them off in an underground terminal below the building. Escalators rise up to plaza level, allowing natural light to filter in.

7. Facade

The glazed, self-shading exterior regulates how much sunlight and heat penetrate the building, reducing the need for air-conditioning. NBBJ estimates that the building uses 40% less energy than a typical office tower.

8. Lobby

Tencent is developing a building-wide internet-of-things system to help automate heating, air-conditioning, and security. Already, facial-recognition technology identifies employees and allows them to access certain floors. Smart rooms within the building can adjust their temperature based on how many people are in them. Robot guides in the lobby show people to bathrooms and other facilities.

After notching $1 billion in revenue and turning a profit last year, phone maker OnePlus is getting its first U.S. wireless carrier deal with T-Mobile, which will sell the just-announced OnePlus 6T in 5,600 retail stores.

The OnePlus 6T bears several similarities to other high-end phones from Vivo and Oppo, which are also owned by parent company BBK, but don’t have wireless carrier deals. Most notably, it has a fingerprint reader built into the display glass–a first for the U.S. market–and just a small camera cutout near the top of the 6.41-inch screen. Other specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, a minimum 128 GB of storage, a large 3,700 mAh battery, and a dual-lens rear camera system.

T-Mobile will begin selling the OnePlus 6T on November 5 for $549 and up, and sales for the unlocked version will start on November 1. The OnePlus 6T also be Verizon-certified for the first time, though the nation’s largest wireless carrier won’t sell the phone itself.

Are you ready to meet your robot physician? Over the past several years, the biggest names in tech, joined by a surge of startups, have made large strides in developing algorithms that can diagnose and predict disease and advise doctors on treatments. Despite some notable setbacks (including a costly failed collaboration between IBM’s Watson Health initiative and MD Anderson Cancer Center), investment in AI health companies has soared, and FDA approvals for new AI health applications have sped up dramatically, thanks in part to the agency’s fast-track initiative. Here, a view of the competitive landscape.

The Standard is here to play. Sort of. As the hotel industry figures out how to navigate hospitality in the age of Airbnb, the boutique hotel chain is focusing on its strengths. “It’s forced us to do better what we’re really good at, and what we’re really good at is bringing people together,” says Standard International CEO Amar Lalvani. “That’s something [Airbnb] can never do.”

That’s where the hotel lobby–and The Standard’s new Lobby app–comes into play. The idea behind the app is simple: Hotel lobbies used to be a place for spontaneous conversations, to meet and mingle with people from around the world. “I think of it kind of like the movie Lost in Translation, the beautiful, spontaneous, unexpected things that can happen in a hotel,” says Lalvani. “Now what happens in a hotel lobby is everyone is looking at their phone.”

Hotel guests who want to play can create an alias on the app–revealing as much, or as little, detail about their real identity as they feel comfortable doing–and can then chat incognito with other guests who are happy to play along. If things go swimmingly, you can send a photo (or a GIF) and even invite a fellow guest to meet up IRL, perhaps in the real world’s hotel lobby. It’s a bit cheeky, a bit daring, and could possibly lead to fun adventures, which is exactly what the team had in mind.

“We understand that people often become a different version of themselves when they travel, especially when the stay in hotels,” says Jimmy Suh, Standard International’s chief commercial officer, who created the app. “They become more adventurous, more spontaneous, and more curious. This app is meant to bridge that spontaneity. Beautiful things can happen when two strangers come together and have a great time.”

That said, both Lalvani and Suh deny that this is a Tinder for Hotels app. “If someone wants a hook-up, there are plenty of hook-up apps out there, and people will have a much bigger pie on Tinder or Grindr,” says Suh.

The app is exclusively available for hotel guests to use during their stay, and all its content disappears upon checkout, leaving no digital trail. However, if this sounds like a precursor to an SVU storyline, there are some safety features built in. First, no real names are used without the user’s consent. Second, it’s easy to block users, decline requests, and if someone is misbehaving, they have built-in reporting features.

“You can report a person who is crossing boundaries and it will go to the management team of the hotel, and they will remove that person from the app,” explains Suh, who acknowledges that the app could be controversial, but hopes the legitimate use doesn’t dampen the potential fun.

The Lobby app debuts at The Standard, High Line today and will be available in the App Store and Google Play.

“When you are used to being ‘other,’ it’s helpful when you have to think about others,” said Instagram head of design Ian Spalter during Fast Company’s Innovation Festival last week. It’s a succinct articulation of how crucial diverse perspectives are to the design industry, perhaps more so than most professions, since many designers have to consider the distinct needs of millions of different users to build products and services–or decide not to build them at all.

Case in point: Some time ago, Instagram was designing AR experiences, and came up with something Spalter described as referencing “’80s hip-hop mixes.” Before releasing it to the public, Instagram held a discussion about how the experience could be abused. “We had a decision to make about how it might be misused as a tool of appropriation,” Spalter said. “We had a conversation about it, we brought in other black people, something I moderated, and we asked, ‘How do we feel about this getting out into the world?’ And we ended up not shipping it.”

The anecdote, which Spalter shared in a panel about diversity in design alongside former Apple designer Imran Chaudhri and Perkins + Will principal and design director Pat Bosch, highlights two key insights:

Diversity is design’s best guard against unintended consequences

Amid growing public awareness of technology’s unsavory effects, the design community has puzzled mightily over how to prevent unintended consequences. How do you steel a design against problems you don’t know how to spot in the first place? One solution: Diversify who creates technology. It’s simple math. The more perspectives you have on a design, and the more varied those perspectives, the more likely you’ll develop something that meets the wants and needs of different groups of people.

A diverse design team is necessary but not sufficient. Diversity has to be incorporated into the feedback process, too.

Intriguingly, the design team that created the ’80s hip-hop experience was mixed, as Spalter recounted last week. But it wasn’t until he took the idea to the broader black community at Instagram that the company decided against shipping it. This is an important detail. Even the world’s most diverse design teams can toil away in silos and become oblivious to the potential impact of their work. If you’re designing products that reach a significant number of users, seeking the input of underrepresented communities should be a major part of the design process, whether you work at Instagram or a two-person design firm.

In the end, it’s just smart business. As technology becomes increasingly global, the companies that serve the broadest range of users will likely thrive, while those that eschew diversity and limit their customer base will stagnate. “These digitally driven products are the most underrepresented [in terms of who works on them] but the most important to design, because they literally have the entire consciousness of everyone using them,” Chaudhri said. “What’s really important there is that the design teams and engineering teams have appropriate representation within them. You have to include people in your design teams and engineering teams that have broad experiences, and if you don’t you need to build them.”

There are a lot of reasons why people don’t vote, but one is simple: For some, it’s too difficult to get to the polls. In the 2016 election, more than 15 million voters said that they didn’t vote because of transportation issues. This year, in a few cities, those voters will have the option of taking a free ride on a bike share bike to vote.

Motivate, the largest bike share system operator in North America, is offering free rides on all of its systems on November 6, including Citi Bike in New York and Jersey City, Divvy in Chicago, Bluebikes in Boston, Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis, Ford GoBike in the Bay Area, Biketown in Portland, Oregon, and CoGo in Columbus, Ohio. To get the ride, riders can enter “Biketovote” in their local bike share app (or “Vote18” in Chicago).

The offer might help people of color, who are more likely to say that transportation is a factor in not voting. “When we see polling places being closed, often in communities of color, the new assigned polling place for these communities is sometimes too far away, and there have been previous reports in past elections of people saying that because the polling place is too far away, they’re going to sit out that election,” says Danielle Root, voting rights manager for democracy and government at the nonpartisan policy institute Center for American Progress. (Though bike shares have some issues around the country in serving communities of color in the first place.)

The offer might also make a difference for younger voters in particular. In the 2016 election, 6 million Americans under 29 were registered to vote but didn’t go to the polls; in the 2014 midterms, 12.5 million young voters didn’t vote. In one survey, many said that they didn’t like the candidates or didn’t have time to leave work or school. But 29% said that lack of transportation was a “major factor.” The number is higher for young people of color.

Motivate’s offer follows one from Lyft, which will give discounts and free rides to polls to “underserved communities that face significant obstacles to transportation,” working in partnership with organizations like Vote.org, which will distribute free codes. Uber is also working with nonprofits to offer free rides on Election Day, and added a button to the app to help voters find their polling place.

Consumers these days expect more from brands than just products to buy. Around two-thirds want brands to take a stance on social issues, and over 50% believe they have more power to effect positive change than our government (these statistics, tellingly, come from an Edelman poll taken two years into Trump’s presidency).

Generally, a foolproof strategy for brands to follow is to listen to what their audience or consumer base is fired up about, and let that dictate where they try to make an impact, says Maxwell Zorick, social impact director for MTV, during a panel at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. “We often feel that our audience is ahead of culture, so we try to move culture to keep up with our audience,” Zorick says. In listening to their audience, for instance, Zorick realized they had to express support of the students participating in the school walkout for gun safety after the Parkland shooting. MTV and all of Viacom cut programming for 17 minutes that day, in honor of the 17 lives lost during the shooting.

For brands, showing solidarity with their audiences by developing campaigns around issues they care about is almost an imperative, adds Jason Harris, CEO of the advertising firm Mekanism. Young people are the ones really pushing brands to engage politically and socially, and by 2020, half the workforce will be millennials. “You have to do it to inspire the workforce,” he says.

“Not that many people like to vote,” says Zeppa Kreager, director of the Creative Alliance, a coalition of over 80 brands and companies working to devote resources to social impact organized through Civic Nation, a nonprofit that runs campaigns to encourage people to take action. But at the same time, the companies under the umbrella of the Creative Alliance, which include Mekanism, MTV, and Broadway Video Enterprises, which produces Saturday Night Live, are dedicating their impact resources, in the lead-up to the midterms, to getting people to the polls. Why? Because the most direct way to effect societal change is to elect people that will push for that change.

Still, voter turnout among young people is generally dismal. A poll over the summer found that only 28% of people aged 18-29 were certain they would vote in the midterms, compared to 74% of seniors. For brands like SNL and MTV, whose audience is primarily young people, the opportunity to try to shift this dynamic was too large and important to pass up.

But in trying to inspire more young people to vote, they’re letting their audience lead the way. Even if people don’t like to vote, as Kreager says, “everybody wants to go to a party.” As the Creative Alliance was trying to figure out how to improve voter turnout, they worked with a professor at Columbia University, who had an idea that if organizations injected more fun into the voting process, more people might participate. Around two years ago, to test the idea, they started hosting nonpartisan parties (with free food) at polling places, and found that turnout at those sites rose by 4%. “We realized that there was a magical thing there,” Kreager says. This year, they’ve turned the idea into a campaign, Vote Together, which, through corporate partners like Comedy Central, MTV, and Mekanism, is directing people to the over 2,000 parties they’re hosting across the country. “It’s making voting more inclusive and more celebratory,” Kreager says.

MTV, too, has taken its own spin on interpersonal connection as a means to voter turnout, and launched a campaign called Plus-One The Vote to encourage its audience to bring a friend along to the polls to vote in the midterms.

What’s interesting about the voter participation efforts brands are backing this year is they’re not, on the surface, overtly risky. As Britta von Schoeler, head of Broadway Video Enterprises, says: “It’s still really scary for a brand to put a stake in the ground on a social issue.” At least on its surface, voter turnout is nonpartisan, but especially when young voters are activated, it tends to benefit the same progressive causes these brands’ audiences want to see advanced.

Ultimately, by stepping up to improve voter turnout, brands are helping to “change power over time,” Zorick says. As a brand, “you can’t just chase issues, but you have to have a core mission and belief as a company, and use that to respond.” Through voter turnout campaigns, brands are leaning on their skills at connecting with their audience, and doing so in a way that encourages them to use that connectivity to effect change.

Stand on Surf Avenue and there’s little evidence that in October 2012, a nearly 14-foot storm tide broke across the Coney Island boardwalk, merging with water from Gravesend Bay and Coney Island Creek, and violently surged across the fragile peninsula from all three sides. Hurricane Sandy’s life-threatening storm sent cars floating down dark, flooded streets and left thousands of residents without light, water, or heat. It left others marooned on upper floors of apartment houses and public housing towers in the neighborhood’s West End. In neighborhoods as close as Bensonhurst, it was business as usual, almost as though there’d been no hurricane. But in Coney Island in the hours and days after, people resorted to eating food tainted by sea water and collected water from hydrants, as sinkholes big enough to crawl through opened from one end of the block to the other.

Six years after the storm killed 43 New Yorkers, and caused $19 billion worth of damage to the city, the boardwalk attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists to its glittering amusement park featuring log flumes, roller coasters, and high-end restaurants. But for residents of the area, it’s a different story. The still-glacial pace of repair in Coney Island has meant many New York City Housing Authority buildings are still in bad shape, while some residents are only now moving back to homes rebuilt by a troubled federally funded reconstruction program. It’s the gleaming mixed-use buildings full of market rate apartments breaking ground on Surf Avenue, and others rising near Sea Gate at Coney’s western tip, that alarm advocates, city planners and locals. They say Coney’s dramatic building boom, triggered by a Bloomberg-era 2009 rezoning, but slowed by Sandy recovery, suggests a dangerous amnesia about how the storm devastated Coney. And a denial about the threat that rising seas and bigger, more dangerous storms caused by climate change pose to this former barrier island.

Managed (or strategic) retreat is a climate strategy that calls for pulling back from coastal areas and letting them revert to nature, while moving residents to higher ground. It’s been part of the conversation since Sandy. The Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery bought out three perpetually inundated Staten Island neighborhoods, demolished the houses, and let nature take over. But in New York City, that still feels like an anomaly. “What we’re doing now is buying time,” says Robert Freudenberg, RPA’s vice president of energy and environmental programs. “We put more sand on the beach, make the walls higher, all these investments to make people feel safe. And in this phase we’re in, of buying time, should we be putting people in harm’s way?”

New Yorkers with means appear willing to take the risk of living in a flood zone in exchange for a good view. In July, data from FEMA flood insurance maps, the Department of Buildings and Localize.city, revealed that 12% of new construction in New York City is concentrated in high-risk flood zones, with the biggest share in South Brooklyn including Coney Island. “It’s all profit for developers,” says Maria Rotella, a lifelong Coney resident whose parents rode out Hurricane Sandy holed up in their Sea Gate home. “You ask people moving to Coney Island if they’re worried about it being underwater in eighty years and they’ll say ‘Eh, I’ll be dead by then.’ ”

Rotella doubts people moving into the new developments are thinking about Sandy or future storms. Or about the future at all. “The lure of living on the beach is just too strong,” she says.

Requiem for a dream

In 2009, when Mike Bloomberg’s hard-won rezoning package was approved by the City Council, no one could have predicted Hurricane Sandy or foreseen how it would telegraph Coney’s geographic vulnerability and economic inequities. Targeting the boardwalk on the edges of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Coney’s West End, Bloomberg sought to revitalize Coney Island through the development of its vacant and underutilized land, establishing an area bordered on West 24th Street, Mermaid Avenue, the New York Aquarium, and the boardwalk. He also ensured that 12 amusement park acres on parkland owned by the city would be protected from development, allocating an additional 15 acres for “complementary uses.” Since then, the amusement area has been developed; its new rides, restaurants and exhibits make it a huge draw for visitors. An estimated 7.4 million people visited Coney Island last summer, many of them riding the Wonder Wheel and the Thunderbolt in addition to availing themselves of the beach.

The city has poured billions into Sandy recovery in Coney Island and into future storm defense and preparation. The money is being spent on renovating Coney Island Hospital (battered by Sandy) and on hardening infrastructure and funding studies on areas of risk like Coney Island Creek. In 2013, it allocated $294 million for resiliency projects and received $13 billion from the federal Hurricane Sandy relief bill. New building codes approved by New York’s City Council require sea level rise and storm surge protections and impose new standards for developers operating in floodplains. Neptune and Cropsey and Mermaid avenues are being upgraded; Surf Avenue is being elevated by 3 feet.

OneNYC, the de Blasio administration’s expansion of Bloomberg’s environmental program, PlaNYC, strategically linked the city’s biggest challenges: population growth, aging infrastructure, inequality, and climate change. “We are putting in place comprehensive resiliency measures all across New York City to adapt to the impacts of climate change and help build a fairer city for all,” a City Hall spokesman said in an email to Fast Company. “In Coney Island, the City has invested millions of dollars to help residents recover from Sandy by rebuilding stronger, more resilient homes while working to ensure that the coastline is better equipped to withstand rising seas and extreme weather.”

But residents like Ida Sanoff say the city hasn’t done enough to protect Coney Island and neighboring Brighton Beach, where she rode out Sandy, from the next big storm. Much less from the rapid changes that are coming with rapid sea level rise. Sanoff is executive director of the Natural Resources Protective Association environmental watchdog group. “What’s been done since Sandy,” she asks rhetorically? “Absolutely zero. They put a little more sand on the beach, which has already eroded. I’d say we have enough sand left for a Category 1 Hurricane. Anything stronger than that, or worse than that, and the water is coming over the boardwalk.”

Storm clouds on the horizon

The water that’s coming is only one element of the bigger, darker climate change picture. Even before Hurricane Michael savaged the Florida Panhandle and Hurricane Florence slammed into the East Coast, dumping record amounts of rain and triggering catastrophic inland flooding in North Carolina, the globe’s other extreme weather events–fire tornados in California, record-breaking temperatures in Europe, the days when the Arctic Circle was hotter than New York City (and actually on fire)–signaled that the planet is being irrevocably altered by unchecked human activity. “What’s so alarming and real about the climate threat is that it’s no longer a prophecy,” says District 47 Council Member Mark Treyger, who represents Coney, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, and Sea Gate. Treyger co-created the council’s Recovery and Resiliency Committee after Sandy. Last year, he was behind the creation of a new task force to fully assess the city’s Sandy recovery to date. This is real. And the threat is increasing by the day.”

Treyger successfully petitioned to include Coney Island and Southern Brooklyn in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Rockaway Reformulation Study, potentially making Coney Island eligible for federal resiliency dollars. But his frustration over the lack of a comprehensive regional climate plan is obvious. “Even if there was consensus on how to protect Southern Brooklyn, there’s no money for any of it. I’ve appealed to federal partners–Schumer, Gillibrand, Hakeem Jeffries in the House. Staten Island was able to get money because they had coastal studies going back decades. For Southern Brooklyn, there was no analysis until we insisted that the Army Corps of Engineers include it in their study. That’s how far behind Southern Brooklyn was.”

What’s perceived as a piecemeal climate strategy bothers Ron Shiffman, too. Shiffman is a former member of the New York City Planning Commission and a professor at Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. He believes OneNYC is moving in the right direction from a planning perspective, but that there’s a disconnect between the city’s planning and development functions, which prevents the city from realizing a truly comprehensive climate change policy. “We have to have a much more comprehensive plan that involves managing water. In my mind, what we have now is unconscionable. As is this ad-hoc development in places like Coney Island and the message it’s sending and the danger it’s creating for everybody there. As our memory of 2012 has ebbed, it’s easier to get financing for doing things we shouldn’t be doing.”

“Take your Go bag and run for your life”

Coney residents watching the new construction point to derelict Mermaid Avenue, the run-down commercial corridor that has been described as London after the Blitz. According to a Commercial District Needs Assessment, Coney’s three major commercial corridors–one of which is Mermaid Avenue– have an 11.5 percent storefront vacancy rate, almost twice the city’s average. “Building new luxury apartments here is like fixing your hat when there’s a hole in your boat,” Jaime Cartagena, a graduate of Liberation High School on West 19th Street, said recently. “Look around, there are 33 empty storefronts on Mermaid Avenue. We don’t even have a rec center. We need things like community centers in the West End, places for kids to play.”

Treyger believes one of the most effective ways to reduce flood insurance costs is to invest in resiliency and flood mitigation through a fully funded and comprehensive climate plan. “The more time we waste, the more these storms will impact the poorest and most marginalized, the most vulnerable, both financially and coastally,” he says. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”

This past summer, the Army Corps of Engineers sought public comment on a variety of flood protection designs for New York City and surrounding areas, referred to as New York-New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries. In a conference room at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, images of Rotterdam’s renowned flood system were projected on the wall, implying that something akin to it might also protect New York City against flooding. There was no mention of the fact that the Dutch have retreated from the coasts as part of their flood control strategy. Or that they’ve allowed certain areas to flood and are planning not on a 100-year basis, but on a 1,000-year basis.

To some in the audience, the Corps didn’t appear any closer to solving the problem of rising seas and inundation than they were in 1972, when they proposed building a 15-foot-tall sea wall made of concrete pilings and steel sheets that would stretch from Manhattan Beach to Sea Gate. After the presentation, Ida Sanoff summed up the city’s plan for coming climate-related disasters: “It’s basically ‘take your Go Bag and run for your life.’ ”

Classic adaptation strategies–building defenses against the sea, fortifying homes but also relying on federal money to build back after a storm–are unrealistic without also employing more radical approaches. Jesse Keenan, of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, says transformative adaptation will mean having to think about what to protect and what to let go. “To do something about climate change means that we’re going to have to move people. While work is being done behind the scenes, there isn’t a human being in elected office or in public authority in the city or state of New York who’s willing to stand up today to publicly say transformative adaptation is in the long-term interest of the people.”

Are Sea Gate, Coney Island, and Brighton Beach defensible in the face of the probabilities associated with climate change? “Absolutely not,” says Keenan. “It’ll be a completely spatial segregation of the haves and have nots around their buildings’ engineering capacity and the weather.”

Fast Company: When stuck creatively, you . . .

Lisa Nishimura: Get out of my head and create with my hands: gardening, ceramics, or cooking.

LN: I listen. I’ve grown to deeply appreciate that there is a wide array of communication styles, and I regularly gain valuable insights from self-proclaimed introverts by just giving them the right time, space, and opportunity to share their thoughts.

FC: Your worst habit?

LN: I over-program my schedule. One of the challenges of loving what you do is that you always want to do “one more thing.” But having a family has been a gift and made me more efficient. I want my team to be prepared for meetings with me: Let’s be productive, efficient, fast—because you’re standing between me and getting home to have dinner with my kid.

FC: To unplug, you . . .

LN: Go hiking with my 8-year-old, ideally where ocean meets forest. Big Sur is heaven on earth. Locally, in Los Angeles, I do hikes throughout Topanga Canyon.

FC: What book do you recommend to everyone?

LN:Let My People Go Surfing, by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Shoe Dog, by Nike’s Phil Knight. They generously share their ambitions, failings, triumphs, doubts, accidents, and alignments of opportunity and preparedness throughout the genesis of their companies. It’s one thing to look back on your successful business story; it’s another to let people in on the dogfight of how you arrived.

FC: What’s your wardrobe staple?

LN: I love trainers. Everything from Nike to Rick Owens, Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, and Buscemi.

LN: That I couldn’t have a legitimate career in the arts. My parents have always been supportive, but as immigrants who lived through World War II in Japan, I think their dream for their children was always for respectability and security through hard work. That meant fields like medicine, engineering, and finance. I distinctly remember, in middle school, my father suggesting I go into insurance or the Coast Guard.

FC: What was your career fork in the road?

LN: Falling into the music industry instead of going to medical school. I graduated off-schedule, so to fill some time I took an internship at Windham Hill Rec­ords. When I got it, they said, “It pays $4.70 an hour, and there’s absolutely no full-time job on the other end.” To my surprise, after three months, they offered me a full-time gig . . . so I took it.

FC: What’s always in your bag?

LN: A Japanese omamori—good-luck talisman—from my mother.

LN: The Kyoto Ritz-Carlton. The architecture and layout of the hotel are sublime. It’s located on the banks of the Kamogawa River, and you feel the integration of nature into all elements of design, throughout each of the rooms.

FC: Your go-to food for fast fuel?

LN: Fuji apples and coffee.

LN: A handwritten note. You can’t rush them, you need to be intentional. I have my favorite fountain pens, and candle wax and stamps to seal. It’s a bit of a lifelong passion, perhaps from reading too many Jane Austen novels as a kid.

NASA’s first trip to Mars may be a few years off, but that didn’t stop the space agency from embarking on a new mission to the Red Planet in podcast form.

The eight-episode series “On a Mission” launches today, letting subscribers follow along with the InSight lander as it travels hundreds of millions of miles through space in the hopes of landing on Mars on November 26. Once there, the little lander will spread its solar panels, stretch its robotic arms, and stay put. InSight is designed “to study an entire planet from just one spot,” according to NASA, studying marsquakes and Mars’s heat, tracking radio signals, and trying to get to the bottom of the “wobble” in Mars’s rotation, which could be a clue about the state of the planet’s core.

“On a Mission” will track Insight’s journey through interviews with the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While interviews with aerospace engineers and rocket scientists may not sound like the most scintillating podcast, it is a surprisingly captivating story, as the odds of Insight reaching the surface safely are slim, since fewer than half of Mars missions make it.

The first two episodes are available now at NASA, the InSight website and Apple Podcasts. Add it to your podcast playlist now.

“There’s a joke in China that you can tell the ‘it’ color of the season by looking at the color of the rivers,” Orsola de Castrocan, a fashion designer, says in the 2017 documentary RiverBlue. Pipes running from some apparel factories in China–and Bangladesh and Indonesia and other countries that feed American fast fashion habits–dump red and blue and green wastewater into local streams and rivers. Downstream, people drink the water and eat fish that have been living in it.

Some brands are working with factories to limit how much dye goes down drains and keep some of the 3,500 chemicals used in the industry out of waterways. But a handful of designers are questioning whether we need to use those chemicals at all, and experimenting with coloring fabric with microbes instead.

In her lab, Chieza works with Streptomyces coelicolor, a bacteria that produces pigment as it grows during its week-long life. “By day three, you’ve got lots of pigment being pumped around its environment, ” she says. “So as a designer, I looked at the environment and said, ‘What if that environment was a textile substrate?’ ”

The microbe naturally changes color based on the pH of the medium it grows inside, so by tweaking that environment, it’s possible to create navy blue, for example, or bright pink. With synthetic biology, Chieza says, it will be possible to program the organism to produce an even fuller range of colors. The whole process uses significantly less water than typical industrial dyeing. Unlike natural dyes, it also doesn’t require the use of agricultural land and pesticides to grow plants to make the dye, and it doesn’t require heavy metals to fix the dye to materials.

Bacterial pigment is biodegradable, but designers still plan to avoid dumping it into water. “We’re looking to create a closed-loop process where there’s no effluent that ends up in waterways,” say Laura Luchtman and Ilfa Siebenhaar, who run a Netherlands-based lab, called Living Colour, that is also experimenting with the process (their lab focuses only on strains of bacteria that naturally produce pigment, and they don’t plan to use genetic engineering; the designers are interested in how working with living organisms can create a new aesthetic of color). “Leftover pigment could also be used for products that require less saturated pigments than textiles.”

The technology is still at an early stage. Living Colour is beginning to collaborate with small brands and independent designers, but says that working at a larger scale will require more development. “We need a process that can be scaled and that is affordable and safe on a large scale,” say Luchtman and Siebenhaar. “This research requires investments from patient investors that are not just looking to make a quick profit. We are working with scientists to test if our way of working can be scaled. And we need to execute a thorough life-cycle analysis, because we need to make sure that a bacterial dyeing industry doesn’t cause new problems.”

The structure of the clothing industry, and fast fashion in particular, makes it difficult to change industrial processes. “By and large, fashion is limited by its production cycles, and so people don’t tend to have this long-term view around R&D,” says Chieza. Companies tend to be focused on finding the cheapest way to make clothes, not developing technology. “When you’re looking to just buy and integrate something into your supply chain, sometimes I think that’s a limited view of how to make it the best it can be. Imagine a world where fashion companies are actually driving this change and they are investing in it, and they’re seeing themselves less as producers of clothing and more as technology companies.”

Though Chieza can’t yet name the companies, Faber Futures is now working with some forward-looking brands to test how microbes can be integrated into supply chains. The industry recognizes that it has a problem both with the chemicals and solvents used in dye and the amount of water that is used. Some companies have pioneered other solutions; a Dutch company called DyeCoo, for example, uses CO2 to dye fabric instead of water, in a closed-loop system with no waste. Now, Chieza says, some in the industry are beginning to consider bacteria as a new solution.

“They’re starting to look at how they produce and thinking what starts to solve for that,” she says. “For a long time, we’ve been talking about how biology can be a component of changing that ecosystem of manufacturing to make something that’s better. It’s only now that industry is really engaged.”

Bioengineering–using bacteria, algae, animal cells, or fungi–can also be used to make fabric itself. Modern Meadow, one startup, makes leather from lab-grown collagen. Bolt Threads biofabricates leather from mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms and grows synthetic spider silk in a fermenter. These processes could be combined with pigment-producing bacteria.

“I always say that the thing that’s going to make what we’re doing obsolete is potentially a silk that’s engineered to already be produced by this organism with color,” says Chieza. “That’s what’s really interesting is to start to think more broadly: If we are thinking about designing at that molecular scale, what can we build in from the beginning that negates a lot of the processes that we’ve been using in prior industrial revolutions to make things? It really opens up huge opportunity to rethink manufacturing, and to do so with sustainability at the core of how we’re building this technology.”

If one object you own encapsulates who you are, how you think, and what you do, it’s your smartphone. Our phones not only contain our contacts and messages, but capture and store countless other metrics about our lives, from financial records to health data to myriad communications with everyone we know.

Smartphones also contain data about the places we go (and the routes we took to get there) as well as the searches we make and websites we browse (revealing what’s on our minds). Thanks to journaling and to-do apps, they even document our goals, hopes, and dreams. And smartphones aren’t just data-retention devices; the apps and services we use on them broadcast data about us to third parties.

That’s why it’s so important to understand what privacy and security protections the smartphone you use offers–and to make sure you have such protections enabled. I’ve written before that Apple is unique among modern tech giants in that it builds its products with privacy at the forefront. But many of those protections and tools available on every iPhone only make a difference if you’re aware of them–and judging from my conversations with friends, many people aren’t.

If you’re an iPhone user, these are the security and privacy features you need to know about–and should be using.

Security code autofill

What it is: Many sites and apps–from Facebook and Google to financial services–offer two-factor authentication, or 2FA. With 2FA enabled, logging into a website or app requires both your password and a unique code which is texted to your phone number or delivered via an app such as Google Authenticator. You have to input this code in order to gain access to your account. Even if someone else has your password, they won’t be able to break into your accounts if they can’t get the code.

The problem is many people choose not to enable 2FA, which has traditionally been a pain involving hopping back and forth and copying and pasting. So Apple gave iOS 12 a feature called security code autofill. Now when you log into an app or website where you have 2FA enabled, you no longer need to navigate to the Messages app to retrieve your texted 2FA code. As soon as the text with the code arrives, it’ll be routed to the iPhone’s keyboard where you can just tap on the code to autofill it into the security field in an app or website.

Why it’s important: Apple eliminated the most annoying thing about 2FA–which means more people are now likely to adopt it. If an app or website offers 2FA you should enable it immediately. Thanks to iOS 12’s security code autofill, 2FA will no longer slow you down.

How to enable it: Security code autofill is built into iOS 12, so you don’t need to enable the feature on your iPhone. When you get a text with a 2FA security code, it’ll be automatically routed to the code field on the app or website you are trying to log into.

You will, however, need to enable 2FA on any apps or websites you want to use the security feature with. I highly recommend enabling 2FA on every social media and financial site you use. You can see if some of the sites you use offer 2FA here.

Password reuse auditing

What it is: iOS has long had the Keychain–an encrypted password manager that saves your usernames and passwords so they can be auto-filled on apps and websites you log in to. But with iOS 12, your Keychain now has a password reuse auditing tool built in. What this does is identify every instance where you’ve reused a password for multiple sites and apps.

Why it’s important: Password reuse is a major security problem. Before iOS 12, I used the same four or five password variations across over 200 sites and apps–and I wasn’t alone. Two recent surveys found that 59% of people use the same password everywhere and 83% of people reuse the same password on multiple sites. If just one of those sites or apps gets hacked, your information anywhere else you used that password is at risk.

Thanks to password reuse auditing in iOS 12, you can see which websites you’ve reused passwords on and then give them unique passwords. However, that’s not the biggest advantage of this tool. The real advantage is that it visualizes how vulnerable you’ve made yourself by reusing the same password on multiple sites–and as we’ll see in a moment, you can easily create unique strong passwords for every site and app you use.

How to enable it: iOS’s password reuse auditing tool is a built-in feature in iOS 12. To see it in action–and to see which sites and apps you’ve reused passwords on, go to the Settings app on your iPhone, scroll down, and tap “Passwords & Accounts,” and then tap “Website & App Passwords.” This is where your Keychain is located. You’ll need to authenticate with Face or Touch ID and then you’ll be taken to a list of your app and site passwords.

Any site or app that has an exclamation mark in a triangle next to it means you are also using its password for another site or app. If you see this symbol, tap on it. On the next screen you’ll see a link that says “Change Password on Website.” This will take you to that site’s password management screen where you can change your password.

If you have dozens or hundreds of services that use the same password, creating unique passwords may seem daunting–BUT do it anyway. I changed 25 passwords a day for seven days, and now every account I have uses a unique password.

Automatically create strong web and app passwords

What it is: iOS 12 also has a new feature that will automatically create complex and unique passwords for websites and apps. These are passwords that are so complex it is doubtful anyone could ever guess them–even you.

But you don’t even need to write these passwords down. iOS 12 will automatically save them to your Keychain and they will be synced across all your iOS devices and Macs, where they’ll automatically be filled in when you log into a site or app.

Why it’s important: As we’ve seen, even if you already have a pretty strong password, it becomes much weaker if you use it at multiple sites. But most of us don’t even have strong passwords. Generally, people choose weak passwords because they are easier to remember. But password managers like the one built into iOS and MacOS have made remembering passwords obsolete. Still, the problem remains that many people simply don’t create strong, random, and unique passwords. So now iOS 12 will do it for you.

How to enable it: Next time you create an account in an app or at a website on your iPhone, when you select the “Create password” field, you’ll now see iOS has automatically inserted a unique password in the field. Tap the “Use Strong Password” button to use the recommended password and iOS will automatically store it in your Keychain. iOS never generates the same strong password twice.

Set encrypted messages to auto-delete

What it is: iOS automatically uses end-to-end encryption on all messages sent using Apple’s Messages app. This means no one can read your messages except for you and the recipient, not even Apple–even if the company is ordered to by a government agency. Yet end-to-end encryption won’t stop someone who has access to your phone from accessing your messages, which is why you should set them to auto-delete sooner rather than later. Once an encrypted message is deleted from your device, it is virtually impossible to recover (though a copy will remain on recipients’ devices until they delete it too).

Why it’s important: By default, iOS will store all your iMessages on your phone forever–and they will be transferred to your new phone when you get one. But these messages often contain very personal communications with our loved ones or details that could make us or them vulnerable. For example, parents will often communicate with their children about their schedules and whereabouts, such as what time they will be at soccer practice. A third party who gains access to years worth of those messages could reasonably work out where your child is going to be and when. Other times, we’ll share sensitive information with our family or friends via text messages–like the code to our home security system if a friend is watching our place while we are away. This information would be invaluable to a stalker or thief and there’s no reason a copy of it should be sitting around on your phone for years.

Beyond issues of privacy, years worth of text messages can take up an insane amount of space on your smartphone. Back when I had my text messages set to save forever, I looked at how much space they were taking up on my 64GB iPhone: 8.5GB! And I never go back and look at text messages that are more than a week old.

How to enable it: On your iPhone go to Settings>Messages>Keep Messages. On the next screen, you’ll be able to select to keep messages for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. By default, this is set to forever, but I recommend everyone set it to 30 days, or at the most, one year.

Use Safari

What it is: iOS’s built-in web browser.

Why it’s important: Apple has given Safari built-in privacy features that other web browsers like Google’s Chrome would never dream of offering. The most recent version of Safari stops advertisers from tracking you around the web, stops Facebook and Google from tracking your browsing history via like and share buttons, and stops websites from identifying you by “fingerprinting,” a technique which uses your device’s unique digital signature to identify it online. Safari also lets you manage if websites can gain access to your camera and microphone.

How to enable it: Safari is iOS’s default browser, so in order to take advantage of its privacy features, you just need to use it to traverse the web.

Audit and block apps that have access to your camera, microphone, location, and more

What it is: iOS offers you an easy way to see what apps you have given permission to access your camera, microphone, contacts, location, reminders, photos, health data, and more. You can also easily revoke an app’s access with the tap of a button.

Why it’s important: If you’ve decided you’ve given an app too much access to your info or hardware, you can easily revoke that app’s access at the system level, cutting it off from harvesting any more of your data.

When considering if an app should continue to have access to certain types of your data or hardware, ask yourself if you use features in that app that requires such access? For example, if you never check yourself into places in Facebook, why should the Facebook app continue to have access to your location data (which it is then free to use in other ways, such as for tracking your movements)?

How to enable it: Go to Settings>Privacy and you’ll see a list of various types of data your iPhone holds, from location data to photos. You’ll also see items like camera and microphone in the list.

Tapping on any one of these items takes you to a list of apps that have requested access to that type of data, such as health data, or your iPhone’s hardware, like its microphone. To restrict an app from accessing that data anymore, simply toggle its switch to off. Now the app will be completely blocked from accessing that data or hardware. The only way it can regain access again is if you toggle its switch back on.

Search more privately by changing your engine

What it is: By default, Safari uses Google’s search engine to return results when you do a web search. Google pays Apple billions every year to be the default search engine. But Apple also allows you to choose a different search engine, including offering the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo.

Why it’s important: Using Google for search just gives the company more information about you and allows it to better track your movements around the web. In the past few years Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo, and even underdog DuckDuckGo have improved their search algorithms; all three now serve results that are virtually indistinguishable from Google’s. I recommend DuckDuckGo, since its business model doesn’t rely on collecting data about you.

How to enable it: Go to Settings>Safari>Search Engine and tap DuckDuckGo.

Quickly disable Touch ID and Face ID

What it is: Depending on which iPhone you own, you use either Touch ID or Face ID to unlock your phone without needing to enter a passcode. They’re handy, but don’t offer the same amount of constitutional protections that passcodes offer. That’s why iOS now allows users to disable Touch ID and Face ID at a moment’s notice.

Why it’s important: Thanks to Fifth Amendment protections, in most instances law enforcement can’t compel someone to enter a passcode to unlock a device without a search warrant. But courts have said that biometric authentication methods aren’t similarly protected. In many states, law enforcement can force you to unlock your phone using Face ID or Touch ID–and you must comply if asked. Law enforcement aside, while Touch ID and Face ID are convenient, both leave you vulnerable to unwanted unlocks when you are sleeping.

How to enable it: Go to Settings>Emergency SOS and make sure the “Call with Side Button” toggle is on (green). Now, whenever you want to quickly disable Face ID or Touch ID press the iPhone’s Side button five times. A screen will appear that shows three sliders: power off, Medical ID, and Emergency SOS. Below them will be a cancel button. Once this screen appears, Face ID and Touch ID are automatically disabled and you’ll only be able to unlock your phone with your passcode (keep in mind, once you unlock it with a passcode, Face ID and Touch ID are reenabled).

In a worst case scenario, nuke your data

What it is: iOS offers a feature which deletes all data on your iPhone if the wrong passcode is entered 10 times in a row.

Why it’s important: The contents of your iPhone contains personal and private details about every aspect of your life. If the worst happens and someone steals it, it’s good to know that with this security feature, the thief won’t have endless opportunities to guess your passcode. Once they get it wrong for the tenth time all the data on your iPhone will automatically be deleted, and can’t be recovered.

Yes, this is a worst-case scenario, but it’s better than having all your personal and private data in the hands of a thief or hacker.

How to enable it: Go to Settings>Face ID & Passcode (Touch ID & Passcode on an older iPhone) and at the bottom of the screen toggle the “Erase Data” switch to on.

If you look closely at a pair of Arvin socks, you notice that while they might be green or blue or yellow, it’s not all the same shade all the way through. The tightly knitted threads shift from slightly darker to slightly lighter, almost imperceptibly, throughout the sock.

That’s because Arvin doesn’t make its socks from manufactured, uniformly dyed threads. Rather, they compile them from scrap fabrics, sourced from factory cutting-room floors, sorted by colors, and ground up and woven into a new, 100% recycled fiber.

Launched in June 2017, the Seattle-based company, founded by Dustin Winegardner, an apparel-industry veteran, and Harry Fricker, a creative director, makes just the basics: socks and underwear. When business partner connected Winegardner and Fricker over their shared interest in branding, design, the outdoors, and sustainability, they decided they wanted to channel those shared interests into a company that would touch on all of them. Socks and underwear, Winegardner tells Fast Company, had the most potential for impact because everyone wears them. Through Arvin, he and Fricker wanted to prove that such universal items could also be made in a way that leaves less of an environmental footprint than typical production methods.

The name “Arvin,” Fricker says, comes from an old English and Germanic word meaning “friend of the people,” which he stumbled upon in the process of poring over word lists, trying to come up with a name for the company. To him, it reflected the company’s mission of trying to make useful products for people, while minimizing harm to the planet we live on.

Arvin has set up partnerships with several such facilities to source the material for their socks and standard underwear collections. “The yarn we use for our products does not need to be re-dyed, and there’s no chemicals or water used to produce it,” Winegardner says. The company estimates that in its first year of production, it’s saved around 4 million gallons of water in basics production. (They estimate that manufacturing one pair of socks from recycled yarn saves 50 gallons of water.) And Arvin just debuted a new line of men’s boxers made from Econyl–a recycled nylon thread made by an Italian company from hard-to-reuse products like carpet liners and plastic bottles.

A pair of socks goes for around $10, and a pack of boxer briefs goes for $69. While Arvin is still small–it’s slowly growing its direct-to-consumer business, and expanding its retail partnerships–the founders think that their products and supply chain could act as a model for other companies looking to minimize their environmental footprint. “If you’ve got everybody wearing socks like this, your impact potential is huge,” Winegardner says.

Fast Company celebrated the honorees of the 2018 Innovation by Design Awards at a packed party in New York’s Grand Central Station last week. The evening kicked off with a panel discussion on the future of design and ended with a toast to the competition’s nearly 400 winners, finalists, and honorable mentions.

Michael Wang, of the AI healthcare startup Inspiren, received the third annual Linda Tischler Innovation by Design Award, honoring bold, up-and-coming designers, and partygoers perused a display of some of the year’s top product design, from a sculptural router to an emoting robot. It was an inspiring look at the state of design today–and where it’s headed next. Click through our slideshow above for more.

Grammy Award-winner Pharrell Williams has threatened to sue President Trump for the use of his hit song “Happy” at a campaign rally just hours after the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, reports CNN. Williams’s attorney sent a cease and desist letter to Trump on Monday. In it, his attorney wrote:

“On the day of the mass murder of 11 human beings at the hands of a deranged ‘nationalist,’ you played his song ‘Happy’ to a crowd at a political event in Indiana. There was nothing ‘happy’ about the tragedy inflicted upon our country on Saturday and no permission was granted for your use of this song for this purpose.”

The letter goes on to state that the unauthorized use of “Happy” constituted trademark and copyright violations and that “Pharrell has not, and will not, grant you permission to publicly perform or otherwise broadcast or disseminate any of his music.”

With this letter, Williams joins a long list of artists who have told Trump not to use their songs at campaign rallies, including Queen, the Rolling Stones, the O’Jays, and Adele.

Ghost hunters are notorious for lurking through graveyards and “haunted” houses with camcorders set to night-shot mode, anxious to catch spirits on video. No matter that these hunters are really just seeing glimmers of light hitting a hypersensitive camera sensor. The footage can be sensational all the same, if only because it serves to remind us of so many people who’ve lived before we did, occupying this planet before our time.

Now, an AI system developed by MIT students Ziv Epstein and Michael Groh adds spooky figures to your photos, no reality TV show required. Called AI Spirits, it’s a website that lets you upload empty landscapes, to be haunted with humanoid shadows.

“In the world all around us, many people have lived full lives and passed on. Yet they are still with us emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually,” says Epstein. “In the business of daily life, we can forget them and only see the empty scenes all around us. AI Spirits is a visualization of saudade: the presence of absence.”

AI Spirits works so well because it places ghostly figures exactly where your brain naturally thinks they could be–on a path in the middle of a forest, rather than, say, floating randomly through the air. Technically, AI Spirits builds upon the team’s last project, dubbed Deep Angel, which could delete people from uploaded scenes. These scenes that users uploaded–5,000 in all–became fodder to train a new AI on where people would be most likely to stand in an empty frame. Mix in some generative painting to create figures from scratch–a task AI is very good at already–and the ghosts come to life.

AI is very good at stoking fear. We have apocalyptic origin stories that have set culture’s dark expectations for AI, like the Terminator, but we’ve also seen real AI write horror stories and generate nightmare imagery. (Indeed, artificial intelligence is the real monster that should keep you up at night.)

AI Spirits, for its part, is more than a spooky demo; it’s a primer on machine learning. “It helps provide some transparency into what the model is learning by showing the kinds of patterns, textures, and locations the spirits are being generated in,” Epstein says. “We want to create a conversation about how these technologies can be used and what they are learning.” Namely, how to scare you.

When Hurricane Maria decimated the island of Puerto Rico, James Beard Award-winning chef José Andrés stepped away from his ever-expanding restaurant empire, where serves up small plates to a well-heeled clientele, in order to help to feed an island full of hungry, bereft people. He did what FEMA couldn’t–or wouldn’t–do and with the help of a fleet of volunteers, he cooked millions of meals for the American citizens left behind in the wake of the devastating storms. He documented the experience and his evolution from chef to restaurateur to relief worker in his captivating, and aptly named, book, We Fed an Island.

When he’s not feeding the weary, hungry masses, Andrés travels the world opening restaurants, but also helping people through World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit he founded after the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which tackles issues of hunger and poverty through providing food.

We asked the chef, author, and humanitarian to share a few of the items that help him unwind after a long day in the kitchen, meetings, or saving the world.

What’s your Off Switch?

My off switch is to play Tanks or Fortnite for 30 minutes–just long enough to clear my head. Also in the summertime one of my favorite things to do at the end of a long day is to watch the lightning bugs with a glass of good Spanish wine in my hand.

What’s your On Switch?

Even before I have my coffee, even before my girls and I have fresh citrus juice, I like to start my day with time on the elliptical, watching a documentary or new TV series. It gets my brain and body moving!

What’s a product that you are currently in love with?

I absolutely could not live without my iPhone X. It is not just one tool but a million. I record voice memos for new ideas for dishes, FaceTime into meetings, take notes and photos, set a timer for when I am making paella, connect with my teams on the ground in disaster zones through WhatsApp, play video games, watch TV. I would be lost without it.

What’s a high-price-tag product that you recently splurged on, but feel no buyer’s remorse because you adore it so much?

I have a Farmshelf installed in my house. It is an amazing indoor garden that lets me grow herbs and ingredients that I can’t find anywhere else, instead of buying them and shipping them from far away.

What service or tool can you not live without?

I have to say Twitter. It is an incredible universe of conversations between chefs, farmers, humanitarians, politicians, activists, scientists, teachers, students–everyone, really! When we are working in disaster zones like we have for the last year it has become our window to the world. While working in Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Hawaii, Indonesia, and beyond it has kept us connected to the rest of the world. We are all connected, all one army thanks to Twitter.

What do you do with the free time you have?

With just five minutes, I’ll open up a cookbook and read a few recipes, learn new techniques and history.
If I have a free hour at home, my girls and I will go out and work in the garden or our beehives.
If I have a whole free day, I will drive to Virginia to visit wineries, to eat at new restaurants, to discover an inn that my wife and I haven’t seen yet. A full day with a friends and family. It is amazing to refresh your brain and open yourself up to a new world.

What travel tips do you swear by when you’re on the road?

I like to bring my own chopsticks in my carry-on. You never know when you’ll need them! I have a lightweight bamboo set from Patagonia that I love. I also have a solar-powered phone charger, like the one made by BioLite. It is key when you’re going into disaster zones and you don’t know what the electricity situation is going to be. My wife will tell you that I always pack my utility fishing vest–the one I am always wearing in disaster zones–when we travel, even when we are going on vacation. Disaster can strike at any time, and it’s important to be prepared. I love going into vintage book stores where I go–I’m always on the hunt for old cookbooks to add to my collection. Always, no matter where you are, get out and go to the local bar and spend some time talking to people. You never know who you are going to meet.

Edward Snowden’s messenger app of choice has just made itself even more secure from prying eyes. While Signal already sends end-to-end encrypted messages, the company has made those messages even more secure. As Signal explains in a blog post, it has created a way for the sender of a message to be completely anonymous in the message’s metadata, so not only could an outside party not read the content of a message if it is intercepted in transit, but they now cannot even see who is sending the message. The feature is dubbed “sealed sender.” As Signal explains:

When you send a traditional piece of physical mail, the outside of the package typically includes the address of both the sender and the recipient. The same basic components are present in a Signal message. The service can’t “see into” the encrypted package contents, but it uses the information written on the outside of the package to facilitate asynchronous message delivery between users.

While the service always needs to know where a message should be delivered, ideally it shouldn’t need to know who the sender is. It would be better if the service could handle packages where only the destination is written on the outside, with a blank space where the “from” address used to be.

Right now, the feature is available in beta builds of the Signal app, but will be coming to all users in the future, and when it does, it will be turned on by default.

Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signalhttps://t.co/4bNbIbQWzIpic.twitter.com/AsCk0mhh4y

— Signal (@signalapp) October 29, 2018

It just may be the Google Doodle with the best fun factor yet. If you head on over to google.com now, you’ll see the Doodle splash for the game, called Great Ghoul Duel. Click on it to begin playing. (Here’s a direct link for the game.)

In the game, you play a cute ghost whose objective is to collect “Spirit Flames.” Flames can be collected in two ways–by acquiring them directly in your search or by stealing them from other ghosts. The ghost with the most flames at the end of the game wins.

The game also supports multiple players, allowing you to send email invites to up to eight of your friends so you call play together. The game is available now, but if you want to play it, don’t delay. It’ll disappear like a ghost once Halloween passes.