Cool Hunting

After only days of existence, the kluster community has already made quite a name for itself. The Vermont-based "crowdsourcing" firm officially launched it's first product this past March 1st, after a frenzied three days of production. The group announced what they dubbed "Project 72" at the TED conference in Monterey, California in February.

Renowned as a a meeting of "the World's Greatest Thinkers and Doers," kluster took the opportunity to task the conference attendees—as well as the worldwide online community—to collaborate and develop an entirely new product in only 72 hours. The 2,700 participants from 104 countries ran through the development cycle: ideation, content creation, engineering, design, product-naming, marketing and finally fabrication. At the conclusion, kluster founder Ben Kaufman unveiled a prototype.

The resulting item is Over There, a board game aimed at increasing cultural knowledge. It goes by the tagline "the game of global awareness," and operates largely like your average board game, but it asks players to handle some of the world's more vexing crises. You can find more information on kluster and Project 72 on their website.