Innovate Or Die: Winner Announced

Google and Specialized bicycles have teamed up for something they called the “Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest.”    The goal is to create a pedal-powered machine that will transform the pedal energy into a new and useful purpose.  All entries must document their machine in video format. 

The winner of this years contest is the Aqueduct Mobile Filtration Vehicle.  It looks like a tricycle that you’d see at a retirement community in Florida.  What it does is kind of genius, but I do have some logical questions.  To put it simply, it is a vehicle that will transport water, filter the water as you pedal, and then store the water in a clean container.  I could see this being very useful in a part of the world where clean drinking water is scarce.  The people who go out to collect water in heavy containers can now use pedal power to not only get the water back to their homes, but the water is being cleaned as they go.  The front container (which detaches from the trike) is significantly smaller than the back storage/transport containers.  There is a mechanism to disengage the clutch so that you can still filter water once you reach your final destination - otherwise you’d just have to go for a nice bike ride everytime you wanted to filter your water. 

Here are my concerns: a) it’s almost too pretty.  If you put this thing in some village in Sierra Leon or somewhere, I’d think that it’d probably get stolen.  b) Again, if this is in some remote location, where do you get new filters?  It’s not like the average villager just hops on the Interwebs and FedEx shows up at their hut.  Maybe they should hook up with Engineers Without Borders to try to get the cost down and be able to distribute this to where it’s needed.  I like Emily’s water filtration entry.  You could make it very inexpensively and you could use any donated bike.

If you’re wondering what the other submissions were, just checkout their YouTube group for the vids.  Some examples of other entries are: bicycle ambulance, MayaPedal washing machine, a tennis ball launcher, salad spinner, snow plow, coffee maker, and a few different electric generators.

And the winning video…