Powering Cities
Powering Cities is an end-to-end energy harvesting system that converts the kinetic energy of foot traffic into usable electricity for urban environments. It encompasses interactive walking tiles paired with an Apple Watch app that tracks and gamifies the user's environmental impact. I owned the project from technical concept through user-facing prototype: the electromechanical design, physical prototyping, user research, and digital product design were all mine.
The technical core of the project was deciding how to harvest that energy. I evaluated two mechanisms early on. One of them had proven but modest output, and the other had significantly higher theoretical efficiency but hadn't been validated. Rather than presenting both, I made the call to present the proven mechanism at competition while protecting the higher-potential design from disclosure until we had data to support it. We chose to move forward with patenting the second one after data validation.
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Consumer and field research, usability testing, observational studies, competitive and technical benchmarking, data synthesis, insight frameworks
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Applied physics, fluid-mechanical design, electromechanical design, modular system architecture, CAD modeling, physical prototyping, mechanism and joint design, Figma, digital product design, interaction design
The first low-fidelity prototype built with a pressure valve and a walkable surface so testers could physically step on it and feel how the mechanism responds in motion.
Figure 1: Side-view cross-section of a single tile mechanism. Spring-suspended panels keep the surface walkable while flexing under foot pressure, displacing water through one-way valves into adjacent repositories. Flow is channeled to a generator on the right, with a central water tank regulating volume across each compression cycle.
Figure 2: Top-down view of the full modular system. Each oval represents the compressible hydraulic pouch beneath an individual tile, connected through one-way valves that route flow in a single direction across the grid. Compressed water moves tile-to-tile and row-to-row until it reaches generators on either side, then returns through a central repository before recirculating, allowing the system to scale across a full and modular installation while keeping output consistent regardless of which tiles are stepped on.
Figure 3: The signature hexagonal tile pattern, designed specifically to support balanced foot pressure and accommodate walking patterns from multiple directions. Rendered as a pathway installation outside Northwestern's Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center where the original concept was developed.
