So, someone has taken the idea of communal activity as a means of productive energy derivation and made what appears to be a viable product out of it: the PlayPump. Kids play on a merry-go-round-like-thingie and the rotation of the playground equipment pumps water into a reservoir.
This more or less matches the notion discussed earlier in “distributed energy concentration,” except that the generated energy is directly applied to a particular application. The removal of electricity as an intermediary energy resource probably significantly improves the efficiency of the work done by the children, at the expense of generalization. This sort of application specificity definitely seems like a smart idea when a few very specific needs must be met before more generalized infrastructure needs to be supported.
