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The North America category of Fast Companys Innovation by Design Awards honors the most innovative designs in North America. This years winner, ZGF Architects’ Portland International Airport expansion, features sustainably sourced wood roofing, transforming the terminal experience into something that feels more like a walk in a forest. See all of the honorees below. [Photo: Ema Peter] Finalists Flyer Via Pro Electric BikeRadio Flyer Orange County Sanitation District HeadquartersHDR The Colossal Woolly MouseColossal Biosciences Honorable Mentions AbortionFinderPower to Decide and Citizen Tech Collective AI Surgical Optimization PlatformeXeX GridLinkXCharge North America Obama.orgObama Foundation, Work & Co, part of Accenture Song, and Manual This story is part of Fast Companys 2025 Innovation by Design Awards. Explore the full list of companies creating products, reimagining spaces, and working to design a better world. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.
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A curious thing has happened in the workplace over the past two years. People who once prided themselves on being fast, smart, and witty (what in scientific terms we would labeled intelligent) are now quietly wondering whether theyre too slow, too dull, or too analog, at least to keep up with their daily work challenges. Its not that they suddenly got worse at their jobs; rather, their new synthetic coworker never sleeps, never stares blankly at the screen, and can produce a polished answer to almost anything in about eight seconds. Generative AI has become the offices overeager intern, churning out memos, slide decks, and even dad jokes with unnerving speed. And instead of simply enjoying the free labor, many of us are feeling inferior. Welcome to AI Impostor Syndrome: the creeping suspicion that youre not good enough because you cant keep up with a machine. Previously, impostor syndrome benchmarked itself against other humans who were (irrationally) deemed superior to us, but now the benchmark is everyday genAI, which we use and admire but makes us feel useless. What is AI Impostor Syndrome? The original impostor syndrome was about doubting your own talent in the presence of other humans. AI impostor syndrome is its new cousin: except this time, youre not being compared to your coworkers but to a dutiful learning machine with unlimited fuel and dedication. It manifests in small, unsettling ways: guilt about taking more than a minute to draft an email; embarrassment when ChatGPT finds a citation you couldnt remember; or the nagging thought that if you had to whiteboard a strategy without digital assistance, youd be exposed as a fraud. In short, AI impostor syndrome is the feeling that youre somehow failing simply because youre human. A Self-Assessment Checklist Are you suffering from the condition? Ask yourself these questions. Do you hesitate to send a first draft because you think AI could make it cleaner? Have you caught yourself googling best ChatGPT prompts as if they were cheat codes to intelligence? Do you feel guilty taking longer than 30 seconds to compose a Slack reply? Have you hidden the fact that an idea was yours (not the bots) because you assumed people would be disappointed? Does proofreading now feel pointless because the machine wouldnt miss this typo? Do you introduce deliberate typos and grammar mistakes to pretend its not AI Do you feel a secret envy or FOMO when colleagues brag about how quickly they co-pilot with AI? Have you started apologizing for your brains loading time? If you answer yes to most of these, you might be experiencing AI impostor syndrome. Why and How to Overcome It Like its human-to-human predecessor, AI impostor syndrome thrives in environments where speed, reliability, predictability, and net output (quantity rather than quality) are fetishized. The machine is dazzling precisely because it plays to those values. But intelligence is not only about speed: its also about judgment, originality, and the messy process of connecting dots in ways that dont always make sense at first. Here are three ways to push back: 1. Redefine value.Instead of asking Can I do this as fast as AI? ask What can I do that AI cannot? Context, taste, and empathy are still stubbornly human domains. Fundamentally, make sure what you do or optmize actually has value. As the great Peter Drucker noted, there is nothing so useless as to do efficiently that which should be not done at all. 2. Build cognitive fitness.Like physical exercise, thinking is a muscle. If you never lift anything heavier than a predictive text suggestion, your mental biceps will atrophy. Deliberately take on problems without digital shortcuts to keep your mind sharp. 3. Treat AI as a sparring partner, not a rival.Good athletes dont resent their training equipment, they use it to push themselves. If AI raises the bar for whats possible, lean into the opportunity rather than shrinking from it. In Defense of Natural Intelligence (even Natural Stupidity) The dirty secret of progress is that we rarely learn by being right. As Amy Edmondson brilliantly highlights, we learn by being wrong: painfully, publicly, and repeatedly. Natural stupidity is the fertile soil from which insight grows. AI can optimize away mistakes, but in doing so it risks robbing us of the very failures that shape judgment. Theres a virtue in struggling through a problem set, fumbling with a blank page, or blurting out a half-formed thought in a meeting. These experiences are not efficient, but they are developmental. Theyre the rough drafts of wisdom. Think of it as cognitive Pilates: the point isnt to get somewhere faster but to keep the brain flexible, resilient, and less prone to injury. Writing an essay without AI wont always be publishable, but it keeps you mentally supple in a way that autocomplete never will. AI and the Redefinition of Smart The arrival of generative AI has upended our collective definition of intelligence. Memorization used to matter; now it doesnt. First drafts used to matter; now they dont. Even creative riffing can feel less impressive when a model spits out 20 metaphors in two seconds. So what does it mean to be smart in an AI world? The answer lies not in competing with the machine but in using it wisely. There are clever ways of integrating AI into your workflow, asking it to brainstorm counterarguments, to structure messy notes, or to stress-test your assumptions. And there are stupid ways: copy-pasting outputs as your own, outsourcing all original thought, or using it as a crutch for problems you should actually wrestle with. A smart use of AI is leveraging it to scale your creativity; a stupid use is letting it replace your curiosity. Double down on your strengths AI impostor syndrome is real, but its also misplaced. Feeling inadequate because youre slower than the machine is like feeling inadequate because a calculator multiplies faster than you. Of course it does. Thats the point. Our task is not to mimic AIs strengths but to double down on our own: curiosity, judgment, empathy, taste, and the ability to learn from our glorious blunders. Natural intelligence (including its beautful human imperfections) is still the most generative force we have, which is why it is capable of inventing artificial intelligence. If we remember that, then AI wont make us impostors, but remind us of our capabilities.
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In your home, you probably have a handful of gadgets that rely on batteries: remotes, smoke detectors, wireless keyboards. But instead of having to replace those batteries again and again, those devices could one day be powered by solar panels that harvest energy from your indoor lights. The idea of an indoor solar panel sounds contradictory; our lamps and overhead lighting arent the same as the sun. But indoor solar panels have been in development for years. The problem, though, is theyve often been inefficient, expensive, or too unstable to be widely adopted, says Motjaba Abdi-Jalebi, an associate professor at University College Londons Institute for Materials Discovery. We saw an opportunity to change that, he adds. Abdi-Jalebi and his research team recently developed new indoor solar cells that are about six times more efficient than todays commercial indoor photovoltaics, and can be made at low costs. Dr. Motjaba Abdi-Jalebi (right) and PhD student Siming Huang (left) [Photo: UCL/James Tye] To do so, they designed solar cells using a material called perovskite. Researchers have developed perovskite solar panels for outdoor use too, though theyre not yet manufactured at scale or competitive with regular photovoltaics. Perovskite crystal structure often has defects that interrupt the flow of electricity and degrades the material over time, but the material also has its positives: It can actually be turned into an ink, which is then laid down in thin layers. This means it can essentially be printed, like a newspaper. So in principle, Abdi-Jalebi says, you could roll out large sheets of solar cells quickly and cheaply. That differs from regular silicon solar panels, which require high-temperature, expensive manufacturing processes. Perovskite can also absorb a wide range of light, even with that thin layer. Abdi-Jalebis team used a perovskite material tuned specifically to absorb indoor light efficiently, he says. The final result can generate power from any common indoor lighting, from LEDs to fluorescent bulbs. In their study, the indoor solar cells achieved a power conversion efficiency of 38%, under indoor light of 1000 luxroughly equivalent to a bright office. Thats a world record for this type of perovskite solar cell, Abdi-Jalebi says. (Outdoor solar panels, on average, convert around 22% of the sunshine into power.) And whereas perovskite panels usually break down, theirs stayed stable; after more than 100 days of testing, the indoor solar panels kept more than 90% of their performance. Perovskite panels can be scaled up, but getting them to power more energy-sapping devices like laptops or appliances will take more research. Still, its a very exciting possibility for the future, Abdi-Jalebi says. Regular solar panels started out really small, with a low efficiency and limited use, too, but now they provide about 7% of the worlds energythe same as powering all of India. With indoor solar panels powering our smart thermostats or indoor sensors, that means less electronic waste because were not tossing batteries out every few years. As homes and workplaces get filled with more connected devices, the impact could be enormous, Abdi-Jalebi says. Our vision is to replace billions of disposable batterieswhich are a major source of toxic wastewith a clean and recyclable light-harvesting solution. Next, his team is going to work with industrial partners to scale up their indoor solar panel production and integrate the cells into real devices. In the longer term, he adds, we see indoor solar cells becoming as common as batteries are today.
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