Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

More from ecolocal (notes on the redesign coming soon!), this Engadget story describes how the Japanese are using the heat and friction of every passenger passing through the turnstiles and recycling it as energy to power their stations. It’s a great idea and a good example of treating a problem as a moving, mechanical object. Thinking of the transport network as just a series of train tracks wouldn’t give way to this kind of innovation. Thinking of the transport network as a liquid network of people moving from A to B opens up the possibility of harvesting the by-product of movement, friction, and recycling it.

Which, combined with the assertion that Green Tech will give birth the Next Google, makes me think that there’s a similar use of this movement harvesting tecnology, albeit much closer to home.

Pedometers’ are all the rage in the UK at the moment, and have been for about a year now. There are pedometers for mice too, that give you an idea of the distance your hand travels during a computer based session. Wouldn’t it be great to prototype a Green Mouse that harvested the result of all the movement, friction and heat, and recycled it as power for your PC/Mac?

Gamers, too, could benefit from this - customise your Wiimote to store all those jerks, jumps and button-clicks and send that recycled energy back to the console and solve another green tech problem - recycled standby power!