A site just went live today, that aims to do for product design what Wikipedia did for encyclopedia authoring. Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing, which means harnessing the collective creativity of an online community to co-design something. I’d say it’s the piece of the participatory Web that has the greatest (untapped) potential to transform our material lives.
It goes without saying that I’m excited to see how Kluster fares in this space. Others have come before it — Innocentive, Cambrian House, CrowdSpirit, IdeaBlog — but none of these have impressed me as much. Kluster reads like a potent combination of community technologies for online collaboration — prediction markets, community currency, user-generated content, social filtering — and applies it to an area very close to my heart: design. It’s great to see someone create what looks like a solid platform that targets and incentivizes a co-creative community.
However, I have my doubts.