Design that supports humanity

Innovate or Die is a Google sponsored competition for aspiring young designers to come up with a design to build a pedal powered machine that has environmental impact. The following YouTube video is of the wining design:

The design is simply fantastic, and while it doesn’t have much to do with the cognitive part of human factors, it shows how a bit of cleverness can harness otherwise unused energy. This kind of clever design is not just for the third-world, either, but also for the first world. MIT researchers have come up with a way to use the power generated by people’s footsteps to provide power to heavily trafficked places, like train stations:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0926/p14s02-stgn.html