Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2015 i Fast Company

Tiny machines that roam our bodies, delivering drugs and killing tumors: It sounds like science fiction, but someday— depending on how long it takes devices such as the three seen here to reach the market—it’ll be just plain science. 1.The corkscrew This swirly robot was developed by teams in Israel and Germany. Don’t be scared: “It’s not like you inject them and then they move around the whole body,” says researcher Alexander Leshansky. Instead, doctors direct the robot via an external magnetic field, which also provides power. What it’s good for: Agility. With a diameter of barely a micron (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), the corkscrew is too small to navigate the strong current of the bloodstream. But its size does let it move through tiny spaces,…

Story is king “A rule we had on camera was that no one should speak with props: Your hands should be able to convey anything. When you see that on film, it’s amazing. You see the brightest minds—Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners—using just their hands. That’s great filmmaking. You realize that storytelling is so much more powerful than anything else.” Know when to “switch brains “In science and in filmmaking, when you’re starting out, being too critical can kill off a great idea. In that early phase, it’s a very intuitive kind of brain that works. In contrast, when the work matures, you want to be skeptical. You want to be critical. You have to know when to switch over, inside your own brain, between those modes.” Revise. Then revise…

NEW YORK CITY dwellers love to proclaim that we live in “the greatest city in the world!” But is that really true? There’s no way the world’s “greatest” city would have a median home purchase price of $1.7 million and yet still smell like urine on so many street corners. That said, N.Y.C. is great at a lot of things—and could become even greater if it could learn from other cities. Given travel, data sharing, and connectivity, there’s no excuse for all of our cities not to pool their knowledge and become better than they are. Here are some examples of regional excellence, provided in part by a super-scientific survey of my Facebook community. And by “scientific” I mean I adhered to the principles of physics when I posted my…

INDUSTRY UPDATES Keeping up with the ever-roving intersection of business and design takes a keen ear to the ground. Let Design Moves, a new Co.Design article series, be that, er, ear. Find out, for example, why Facebook recently raided the design firm behind the blogging platform Medium, and who’s taking over at the prestigious Frank Gehry School of Architecture. ONLINE FASTCOMPANY.COM What Facebook can learn from IBM about diversity FC Facebook, like its Silicon Valley cohort, has acknowledged its lack of diversity. Ime Archibong, Facebook’s director of product partnerships, points to his former employer IBM for ways Facebook can improve, citing two executives who inspired him, Rodney Adkins and Mark Dean. “IBM has 400,000 employees; there were two African-Americans at the top,” he says. FASTCOEXIST.COM A bionic eye brings sight…

Charles Rivkin MCP 2009 Then President and CEO, Wildbrain Media Now Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs His father was a U.S. ambassador, but as a kid, Charles Rivkin thought that career path was an “impossible dream—like wanting to coach the Yankees.” So he went into finance instead, then moved into the entertainment business, rising to CEO of the Jim Henson Co. in 2000. When he appeared on our 2009 MCP list, Rivkin was the president and CEO of Wildbrain, the company behind Nickelodeon’s toddler-world phenomenon Yo Gabba Gabba! But government was the family business, and Rivkin never lost interest in public service. He was a major fundraiser for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and in 2009 the president rewarded him with the ambassadorship to France and Monaco.…

In our fast-changing, startupcrazed economy, it can seem like only the newest companies have the agility to thrive. But entrepreneurship can propel businesses of all sizes and ages—look no further than Apple, which almost foundered in the late ’90s before Steve Jobs resurrected it to be the most valuable company in the world. So what are the other biggest turnarounds, and what can we learn from them? As part of our 20th anniversary (Fast Company’s first issue was in November 1995), we’ve selected the top comebacks of the past two decades. You already know that Apple’s on top. Turn the page to see the rest of the list, including some surprises 1General Motors Once the world’s most revered automaker, GM faced disaster in the late 2000s, when it filed for…

Bradford Shellhammer was soulsearching on a beach in Rio. It was February 2014, and all he knew was what he didn’t want to do with his life. “I didn’t have dreams of starting another e-commerce company,” he says. He was too bruised. A few months prior, Shellhammer had stepped down as chief design officer of Fab, the designobsessed flash-sale site he had founded in 2011 along with Jason Goldberg, the company’s CEO. Fab was a hit early in its run, scooping up $336 million in venture capital, but it quickly started to experience growing pains. To keep up with the expectations that come with bundles of funding, Fab ballooned from a 14-person design shop into a 700-person corporation that looked more like a traditional retailer than a nimble startup. “Fab…

AbelNook What was it? A trailer with adjustable legs that could be set on uneven terrain, didn’t require any tools to set up, and folded flat for shipping. Why didn’t it work? The cofounders are still looking for investors to foot the bill for manufacturing. Zipflat What was it? A set of collapsible plastic walls that could be shipped flat, opened, filled with insulating foam, and used to build a house. Why didn’t it work? At about $100 per square foot, “it was too expensive,” says cofounder Scott Jewett. Home2O What was it? A system developed by a team of researchers at the New York Institute of Technology to use plastic water and soda bottles as durable roofing material. Why didn’t it work? Aid organizations weren’t interested. Instead, the team…

WHEN I WAS a little boy, my father took me to his tailor in the sleepy Delhi neighborhood where I grew up. I distinctly remember Binks—its chaos; the reams of cloth, yellow chalk, and measuring tape; and even the smell of tobacco and chai. I felt like a grown-up as I was measured by the old tailor master. He noted my measurements in charcoal pencil, and a few weeks later my father brought home three crisp, white poplin shirts, which fit me perfectly and cost less than $1 each. I experience this visceral sense memory when I visit the bright San Francisco loft that houses Trumaker, an online menswear company that specializes in custom-made shirts. Trumaker is one of a growing number of upstarts—J. Hilburn, Knots Standard, Incense Shoes, Modern…

The new Kerrock—a composite material similar to Corian— is strong yet malleable, making it ideal for creating Katedra’s sleek, futuristic surface. Embedded in one corner is an Aircharge surface charger, which will juice up a cell phone on contact. The old Designer Dejan Kos used wood from the Siberian larch tree—the Old World counterpart to today’s indestructible composites— for the drawers. “Wood is an ancient material,” he says. “It’s the first building material, and I left it rough because of that.” The timeless Katedra means “cathedral” in Kos’s native Slovenian. The desk’s combination of rough and graceful materials is meant to evoke the place where the terrestrial meets the ethereal. Around $2,500, depending on exchange rate…

Nasty Gal With her online clothing retailer, Nasty Gal, Sophia Amoruso tapped into a young, female demographic that adored her products and message of empowerment. But in January, less than a year after telling Fast Company that her startup was “leagues behind where it should be”— and publishing a book of business lessons entitled #GirlBoss— Amoruso announced she’d be stepping down as the retailer’s CEO and assuming a more creative role in its branding efforts. Milestones: Nasty Gal opened its first brickand-mortar location, in L.A., last fall. Under new CEO Sheree Waterson, a Santa Monica location will launch this spring. Challenges: The company’s growth has reportedly slowed since revenue hit $100 million in 2012, leaving investors concerned and 10% of Nasty Gal employees without jobs. Buzz: “PART OF BEING A…

Your new album, Vulnicura, is an account of breaking up with your longtime partner. How does working on such emotional material affect your process? ● This has probably been the most impulsive album I’ve done. I just had to listen to my gut, what felt right. What threw me a lot was just how difficult it was. Every time I would want to skip it and just do a disco album I [couldn’t], because it was this big lump of songs I just had to deal with. Most people who go through a period of grief, it’s a process. It’s like chapters in a book: You do the first chapter and then you have to do the next chapter. In that sense it was a process that I wasn’t in…

Early last year, Intel released the world’s first microprocessors built entirely from conflict-free minerals. Carolyn Duran, Intel’s supply chain director, explains how she achieved the milestone The problem For years, government commanders and rebel militias in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have earned an estimated $185 million annually through the illicit trade of gold and so-called 3T minerals (tin, tantalum, and tungsten)—crucial elements in consumer electronics such as cell phones and tablets. The revenue has financed a brutal ongoing conflict resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent people. Intel no longer wanted to contribute to an economy of suffering. The epiphany Identifying how conflict minerals entered Intel’s supply chain would be key to eliminating them, Duran realized. Smelting plants, where raw ore is refined, offered a convenient place…

Cancer is a difficult topic, but Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies, was such a compelling look at the history and future of the disease that it turned into a critical hit and unexpected best seller (as well as the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction). Now Maladies is being turned into a three-part, six-hour documentary that will air on PBS starting March 30. Directed by Barak Goodman (Scottsboro: An American Tragedy) and executive produced by Ken Burns, the film has an ambitious goal: to shift the popular conversation around cancer by emphasizing the impressive progress that scientists are making in both understanding and treating it. “Most people still haven’t fully swallowed the changes that life sciences have brought about in our lives,” Mukherjee…

Forty-five minutes outside Chicago, there is a warehouse. From the outside, this warehouse is like any other. Inside, however, instead of crates and boxes, it contains stacks and stacks of fresh herbs, greens, and lettuce, growing under the carefully tuned glow of 7,000 Philips LED–powered grow strips. This warehouse, otherwise known as Green Sense Farm, is one of the first customers of a potentially transformative new business for the Dutch lighting giant: city farming. For nearly a decade, LEDs have led a lighting renaissance, and for good reason: LEDs use less than half the power of—and run cooler than—fluorescent lights. Furthermore, because they’re built on circuit boards, they can be programmed for everything from televisions to path lights. Only recently have the lights become inexpensive and efficient enough for its…