Walking through Union Station each day around 5:00 one can witness an interesting phenomena. Floors, stairs, and escalators are filled with people hustling and bustling trying to get to wherever it is they are going. There is so much energy all around us that remains untapped. If there were a way to harness that energy, society would have an incredibly efficient and sustainable power source.

City dwellers are generally set in their ways and it is hard to convince people to change. So, what is an attractive way to get these people to think differently about usage and creation of energy? The answer is to make them do nothing.

I have created a floor mat that demonstrates the opportunity for a large scale, sustainable ground surface. Embedded piezoelectric polymers under the surface of each floor section work with no power source to harvest the energy from daily foot traffic and convert it to usable electricity to power other necessary devices. For instance the foot traffic that occures at one El platform during one day could be converted into energy to light that same El stop at night.