Forget Standing Desks: Here's One You Pedal To Power Your Gadgets | FastCompany

Finally, you don't even need to get off your butt to get moving at work.

"I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet may not spend his time well," wrote Henry David Thoreau a century and a half before his society had stuffed its white-collar workers into cubicles with computers. His point, made as part of a longer series of lectures, boiled down to the notion that if you don't sustain yourself with love for what you do, whatever you're doing might be sort of worthless--or worse, without principle or enjoyment.

People who move back to the land to devote themselves to active living are often considered Luddites in our fast-paced modern age. But white-collar office workers don't have to those extremes to at least enjoy their desk work, or participate (to some degree) in the movement. A pair of best friend engineers in upstate New York are Kickstarting a campaign to open-source their dynopods--or pedal-powered work surfaces--that use the power from your legs to charge anything from a smoothie maker to a laptop.

"Bikes are the most efficient transportation machines by far, by an order of magnitude of 10," lead Pedal Power engineer and avid cyclist Andy Wekin says. So when a group of families in Burlington, Vermont, came to his business partner Steve Blood and asked him to help them build an intentional community with localized energy sources, he naturally thought of pedal power...

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