(U-WIRE) BOSTON — The commuters may be worn out, the students may be haggard and the tourists may be tired from walking the Freedom Trail, but the nearly nonstop crowds that move through Boston’s subway stations and public buildings have more energy to offer than they realize — energy two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think may help bring Boston and the rest of the world’s cities one step closer to clean energy.

James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, masters in architecture candidates at MIT, have received worldwide attention for their prize-winning Crowd Farm project, based on the idea that the energy of human movement in a crowd can be captured through a floor design and used for electricity.

PEOPLE POTENTIAL

The bricks in subway stations, for example, are pulsing with energy essentially left in the wake of a crowd, Graham said.

“[The Crowd Farm] takes the residual energy of walking and turns it into productive energy,” he said.

“We move through the city in a physical way,” he continued. “There is a repetition and violence to it, disturbances into ground, into structure. We thought, ‘What if we could do something with it?’”

Graham and Jusczyk’s floor of the future is made of bricks that depress slightly under the pressure of human footsteps. The slippage of the bricks generates friction, and that energy passes through a generator called a dynamo, which converts it into electrical energy.

“It’s like a gentle inverse earthquake,” Graham said.

According to the students, one step creates enough energy to power two 60 watt light bulbs for one second — about 130 joules. Multiply that one step by, say, 28,527 steps, and that’s enough energy to move a train for one second. At least for now, they suggest using it to light a billboard promoting energy efficiency.

“We’re optimistic about the new vision to tackle energy concerns in new and exciting ways that deal with urban scale and our future,” Jusczyk said.

CLASS ASSIGNMENT

The Crowd Farm started as Graham and Jusczyk’s assignment in associate professor of architecture J. Meejin Yoon’s studio class, for which they had to propose a sustainable alternative energy infrastructure for the Porta Nuova train station in Torino, Italy.

The project will work best on an urban scale at first, Yoon said in an e-mail, and can be used on many floor surfaces to harness the most energy possible in public places, “from the small step to large floor plates and transfer levels and civic plazas.”

Graham and Jusczyk won first place when they presented the Crowd Farm at the Holcim Forum 2007 at Tongii University in Shanghai. The April conference sponsored by the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction focused on urban transformation and attracted 250 experts and scholars from 40 countries. Students from Tongii University, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology all took home cash prizes for their posters on urban transformation.

TEST CASE

Graham and Jusczyk presented a stool to show how the design would work. The stool generates electricity when weight is applied to it.

“It has a tangibility ability,” Graham said, “You can imagine a very personal connection to [the Crowd Farm].”

When a person sits on the stool, the weight of the body on the seat causes a flywheel to spin, generating a dynamo that powers a panel of lights. The stool enables people to actively participate in collecting energy typically wasted.

“People acted like children bouncing up and down on the stool,” Graham said.

The stool enables individuals to see the Crowd Farm on a small scale by ilustrating the workings of a dynamo used in the Crowd Farm. The technology for the train station floor design is still being worked on at laboratories at MIT and around the world.

“The stool gives people an immediate one-to-one relationship with their own movement. They could see their physical contribution to the environment, experience the fruits of their labor,” Graham said.

Graham and Jusczyk intended to make consumers aware of their relationship with the city they live in and the energy they expend.

THE MOVEMENT GAINS MOMENTUM

Graham and Jusczyk are not the first to capitalize on human movement. The concept they call “energy harvesting” dates back to the windmill and the waterwheel, and in the last ten years has caught on in several sectors.

For example, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research and development organization for the Department of Defense, has been harvesting energy to power soldiers’ communication devices. According to a May 2006 BBC article, the agency is researching “heel-strike” generators, which can be embedded into a boot heel and can produce upwards of three to six watts of power just by soldiers walking in the boots.

Bicycle riders can power their headlights by pedaling, and some can use electricity-generating backpacks to use cell phones and MP3 players.

An architectural firm put an energy-generating dance floor in place at the Sustainable Dance Club in England.

Yoon said the technology, “piezo-electric energy,” is not quite ready for everyday use — the MBTA isn’t likely to incorporate pressure-sensing floors in its overhaul of the city’s subway stations — but will progress.

“Piezo-electric energy is one area that is progressing, and while it may be some time before the technology becomes affordable, there are clearly interesting applications,” she said.

URBAN LEGEND?

Since the Holcim Forum, Graham and Jusczyk have been praised for “saving the world.” Some individuals believe that the Crowd Farm is already in place at South Station. Still others are quite skeptical, according to Graham.

“It is shocking how people picked up different parts [of the proposal],” Jusczyk said. “It is much different than what we had envisioned.”

Graham and Jusczyk both admit to receiving some “incredible” offers since the competition.

“People are quick to assume that [the Crowd Farm] is ready to go to floor, but it is not,” Graham said.

“It is interesting to see the life the Crowd Farm has taken on,” Graham said. “We are increasingly cautious about making grand claims. Architects are not engineers.”

According to Graham, the Crowd Farm may be in action, say, thirty or fifty years down the road. He said that of anywhere in Boston, South Station would be the place to see it.

An anonymous Wikipedia.com user went so far as to post an entry on the Crowd Farm, detailing how the system would work in the main lobby. Upon reading the entry, many people mistakenly believed that the system was already in place at South Station.

The Crowd Farm is designed for high-impact, high-flow areas, especially train stations, political demonstrations and sporting events. Porta Nuova train station has two subway stations, a stadium, music halls, theatres, nightclubs and a large gathering space for rallies, demonstrations or celebrations.

“Everyone wants to know more about it and whether it can be implemented. Of course, it can, but the questions are at what scale and at what cost. And would the energy it takes to create it outweigh the energy it would capture … at this moment in time. It is great that people are addressing the energy issue with renewed interest and creativity,” Yoon said.

Graham and Jusczyk both said they will work on the Crowd Farm in the future, but for the next year and a half, the 27-year-old graduate students will be studying to achieve their master’s degrees in architecture. Until the resources and technology are available for the Crowd Farm floor design, Graham and Jusczyk will continue to ride their bikes, doing what they can to be energy efficient.