Considering The Nature of Community: The Evolution of the OurThings Community Over Time
I. Introduction
Over the past several decades, our tools for organizing the world around us have become more powerful, more connected, and more abstract. And yet, as our systems for communication, consumption, and coordination have become increasingly digital, many of the most important dimensions of life—our homes, our neighborhoods, our shared spaces—remain stubbornly fragmented. Community, once rooted in proximity and shared ritual, has become harder to define and harder still to sustain. In this context, we find ourselves asking anew: What is community? What draws people together? And how might we design systems that support not only individual agency, but collective continuity?
This essay considers these questions through the lens of the Large World Model for Domestic Life (LWM) —a new kind of platform that seeks not just to optimize logistics or streamline purchases, but to cultivate a new infrastructure for living. It is a platform that recognizes the home as both an intimate space and a social interface. It sees design not as decoration, but as a form of expression and alignment. Moreover, it understands community as something that emerges through shared attention, mutual care, and the slow accumulation of meaning.
We begin by exploring how such a platform might draw a community together through supporting utility, beauty, discovery, and style. We then look at the range of individuals who will be drawn to such a system—from elite early adopters to those undergoing life transitions to the creators and caretakers who support them. We consider the strategic implications of focusing first on one community, and the importance of maintaining quality as the platform scales. In the end, we propose a new attention economy—one that rewards contribution over distraction and authorship over influence. And finally, we reflect on the value of creating a centralized point of focus: a persistent, evolving place where memory, identity, and aspiration can live together.
II. Considering What Draws the Community Together
Throughout history, communities have formed around shared needs, aspirations, and environments. Whether physical or digital, transient or enduring, what binds a group of people together often begins with a practical utility—but grows into something more layered, emotional, and deeply human. In the context of the LWM for Domestic Life, it becomes essential to ask: what is it that draws a community together—not abstractly, but in the daily lived experience of individuals building lives, homes, and futures?
At the most foundational level, utility plays a central role. People are drawn together around the shared desire to create a habitat that supports their habits, values, families, and goals. A community emerges not simply from proximity, but from a mutual investment in building a place that nurtures everyday life. These spaces become an extension of self—reflecting individual and collective identity—and a site for ongoing cultivation. What individuals seek from one another, and from the systems that support them, is both access to goods and services as well as support in refining their environment: guidance, encouragement, and frameworks that help them grow into the life they are imagining. The LWM offers this kind of scaffolding, drawing people into proximity through their shared intention to shape the spaces in which they live.
Equally important is the role of beauty—both in the visual and symbolic sense. Community is drawn together through an appreciation of the spaces that exist and those that are possible. This includes the archive of existing environments—homes, furniture, objects, and rituals—that hold deep cultural and emotional meaning. The LWM activates this archive, making it accessible, searchable, and personalizable. Beyond merely referencing what exists, it facilitates design: enabling imagination, visualization, and, ultimately, realization. Even when a project is deferred or unrealized, the process itself becomes valuable. The system records and refines individual ideas and, in doing so, helps people see themselves not just as consumers of beauty but as creators of it.
Discovery also binds people together. In a world that is increasingly expensive, fast-moving, and interconnected, people need tools to help them make sense of the complexity. The LWM can open up new forms of access—revealing what is possible, what things mean, and how they connect to broader patterns. It helps people locate themselves within larger narratives, whether cultural, historical, or material. Community forms around the shared activity of learning, of tracing meaning through the things and places we live with. Although inherently acts of consumption, the LWM allows them to also become acts of interpretation. In facilitating those acts, it creates a new infrastructure for storytelling and sense-making.
Out of these layers—utility, beauty, and discovery—emerges something highly individualized yet socially resonant: personal style. Style is not merely aesthetic preference; it is the expression of one’s values, experience, identity, and environment. In the context of the LWM, personal style arises both from the universal archive—the shared collection of things—and from its unique manifestation in each person’s life. Style reflects the objects and spaces someone gathers around themselves, but also the community they align with, the events they take part in, and the stories they choose to tell. Community becomes both a network of people and a dynamic conversation between personal expression and shared cultural reference.
Taken together, these forces—utility, beauty, discovery, and personal style—form the gravitational core of a new kind of community. One that is neither purely geographic nor wholly digital, but instead shaped by participation in a shared model of the world and an ongoing process of co-creation. The LWM becomes the connective tissue by helping individuals make better decisions, tell richer stories, and find alignment in their pursuit of a well-lived life. In doing so, it makes visible the often invisible threads that bind us together.
III. The Range of People Who Will Be Drawn Together
The success of any community platform lies beyond its utility. It lies in its capacity to attract, support, and sustain a diverse array of individuals—each with distinct needs, tastes, and motivations. LWM for Domestic Life is built on the idea that, while home is a deeply personal concept, it is also a universal one. The LWM has the potential to bring together an expansive set of participants—from the most affluent collectors to those just starting off. It can do so by offering each person a tailored path into the broader ecosystem. In the process, it creates a layered, inclusive model of community that reflects the world as it is—and as it might become.
At one end of the spectrum, the LWM is especially impactful for those with the most assets. These individuals often feel the pain of fragmentation most acutely: they have numerous homes, extensive collections, staff, designers, and service providers, yet rarely a single interface to coordinate or contextualize it all. They spend the most, and they are exposed to the widest range of designed objects and curated experiences. For them, the LWM offers both utility and clarity—a way to impose order and meaning on their highly individualized, often global domestic lives.
The opportunity also exists to create closed, exclusive circles within the platform—digital representations of elite communities that mirror real-world status and aspiration. These become spaces for self-representation, subtle signaling, and personal mythology. In this way, the domestic profile goes beyond a planning tool to become an aspirational device—representing a lifestyle others admire and desire.
Exclusivity, of course, cannot be the defining logic of the platform. A more powerful—and ultimately more sustainable—vision is one that invites a broader community to look in and participate. The LWM must be designed to feel like a neighborhood: a place where people can see themselves, feel recognized, and choose the degree to which they engage with broader networks of aspiration and influence. For some, that might mean staying rooted in the familiar; for others, it might mean reaching outward toward inspiration. The platform must enable that choice—allowing members to define the social horizon that makes them feel most at home. It is not about enforcing a hierarchy, but about creating a flexible environment where each person controls their frame of reference.
In practice, many of the earliest and most active members will be those navigating moments of transition—moving homes, merging households, downsizing, starting families, aging in place. These transitions often come with pain points, confusion, and a desire for better guidance. The LWM becomes most valuable precisely in these moments, offering clarity, structure, and support. Those who find the model helpful will naturally evangelize it to their friends, families, and communities. The result is a network that grows organically through trust and usefulness, rather than hype or exclusivity.
In addition to members and households, the platform will also draw in professionals of all types: interior designers, architects, service providers, craftspeople, curators, and the stewards of historic homes. For these individuals and organizations, the LWM becomes a powerful interface for showcasing their work, connecting with new clients, and integrating their services into members’ lives more efficiently. Rather than standing apart from the system, these professionals become an embedded layer—adding richness, precision, and human intelligence to the model’s recommendations and planning tools.
Over time, the community that forms around the LWM will become a living corollary to the real world—a digital mirror that grows in accuracy and richness as it is used. The more members engage, personalize, and refine their digital homes, the more the model becomes capable of real-world guidance. The result is a digital twin that is a dynamic representation of how people live, what they value, and how they evolve. This leads to a new kind of social infrastructure: one that transcends geography while remaining grounded in the physical and emotional reality of domestic life.
IV. What It Means to Focus on One Community First
In launching a new platform as ambitious and infrastructural as the LWM for Domestic Life, strategic focus is essential. While the long-term vision is expansive and inclusive, encompassing a wide range of individuals and households, the reality of early-stage growth imposes practical constraints. Limited resources—financial, technical, operational—demand a disciplined approach to early community formation. The question to ask is less who we could serve than who we should serve first in order to build momentum, validate the platform, and ensure that the system matures with the right kind of data, behavior, and feedback.
In the early phases of the company’s growth, we will be able to support only a limited number of members. Technical scalability, onboarding bandwidth, and the cost of high-touch services all impose natural boundaries. At the same time, marketing resources must be deployed with precision. We cannot afford to cast a wide net; instead, we must seed a coherent, visible, and influential community that models what is possible. These constraints point clearly to the strategic merit of focusing first on a distinct, high-impact user base—one that not only benefits from the system but helps define its shape and desirability.
An elite or high-income community offers a strong foundation for early engagement. These individuals tend to have more homes, greater disposable income, and a high degree of interest in the home as both a functional and expressive space. Importantly, they are also underserved when it comes to home goods platforms. While mid-market furnishings have been consolidated through platforms like West Elm or Wayfair, the high end remains fragmented—difficult to browse, specify, and procure. This fragmentation makes the LWM especially valuable, as it can streamline the selection and planning process for thousands of unique items, including highly customized finishes, materials, and patterns. It enables real dialogue between objects, spaces, and individual style profiles—something no single marketplace currently supports.
By focusing initially on a higher-end community, we also follow a well-established historical pattern: many of the most transformative companies—whether in fashion, technology, hospitality, or real estate—begin with a luxury or professional tier before gradually expanding access. This approach allows us to build brand equity, refine the user experience, and establish trust before scaling. Access can be made exclusive through partnerships with luxury multifamily developments, private architecture firms, or premium service providers, as well as through invitation codes or referrals from existing members. Exclusivity, in this case, is not about status for its own sake—it’s about creating a coherent and manageable testbed for a very high-touch, high-stakes system.
This strategy, however, brings with it an obligation: that quality must not decline as access expands. If the LWM is to fulfill its broader promise—to become a widely used planning and management layer for domestic life—then the quality of guidance, personalization, and aesthetic coherence must be preserved. We can address this vision via the model’s architecture is designed with scale in mind. The more it is used, the more intelligent and precise it becomes. And the more refined its early dataset—driven by members with complex needs and elevated expectations—the better it will perform as it grows. Moreover, our commitment to premium services—concierge, staging, storage logistics, and personalized design consultation—will initially serve the elite community but ultimately create a template that can be adapted and extended to a broader member base.
Focusing on one community first is an act of design rather than exclusion. It is about carefully shaping the early ecosystem so that the platform grows in the right direction. By beginning with those who are both most in need of integration and most capable of refining its use, we lay the groundwork for a richer, more expansive, and ultimately more democratic application of the LWMl.
V. Keeping the Community Engaged via a New Attention Economy
Community is not built in a single moment of acquisition—it must be nurtured through sustained engagement. In the current digital landscape, engagement is often engineered through an attention economy optimized for advertising: users are drawn into platforms to linger just long enough to be served an ad. This logic, while lucrative for platforms, leaves users disempowered—agents of data extraction rather than participants in value creation. The platform that we are building proposes an alternative: an ecosystem in which users are rewarded not for consumption alone, but for the time, thought, and care they invest in shaping their world.
Today’s dominant platforms operate by triangulating three imperatives: show the right ad, to the right person, at the right time. This means capturing as much behavioral data as possible, then refining recommendation engines to predict and manipulate user choices. The promise is utility—tools that feel personalized, relevant, frictionless. The underlying goal, however, is not to serve the user, it is to serve the advertiser. This dynamic creates shallow engagement loops, where the user’s attention is the product being sold, not the source of value creation. Even platforms that do offer meaningful services often subordinate those services to monetization through targeted ads.
The LWM reverses this equation. Rather than extracting value from attention, it seeks to reward members for contributing to a shared project: the digitization, interpretation, and enhancement of the domestic world. Members are encouraged to spend time building their model of the world—not only because it helps them plan more effectively, but because their participation directly strengthens the platform itself. When users scan spaces, upload inventories, annotate collections, or refine their style profiles, they are training the model. They are improving the underlying system for everyone, including themselves. In return, they receive real value—economic rewards, improved recommendations, enhanced services. The result is a flywheel: the more deeply a member engages, the more benefit they receive, and the more the model matures.
This ecosystem is supported by a rewards system designed to reinforce meaningful engagement. Members accrue points by reaching milestones—building out their world model, exploring new ideas, sharing insights, inviting others, or contributing to community dialogue. Time spent expanding one’s horizon, refining one’s taste, or increasing one’s planning agency translates directly into tangible rewards: discounts, early access, concierge services, or exclusive content. Importantly, these points do not reward passive scrolling or addictive consumption—they reward constructive participation in the creation of one’s domestic reality.
The rewards system extends naturally to influencers, hyper-users, and curators—not through direct commissions, but through recognition of leadership. A member who focuses deep attention on a place, a material, a craft, or a cultural tradition becomes a resource for others. When their contributions spark exploration or influence decisions, they are rewarded—not for selling a product, but for enriching the collective knowledge base. This distinction is critical: we don’t want to create yet another influencer economy where personality trumps content. Instead, we aim to build a system where knowledge, taste, and care are rewarded on their own terms. The emphasis remains on cultivating one’s own environment rather than emulating another’s.
This logic can extend beyond users to include inspiring places, historic collections, editorial content, and public institutions. Museums, design archives, heritage homes, and even well-preserved neighborhoods can become nodes in the system—gaining visibility and recognition as users engage with their stories, aesthetics, and spatial logic. As attention is focused on these sources of meaning, they too accrue value—both culturally and economically through partnership, preservation funding, or affiliated services. The model thus enables a broader stewardship of the physical world, guided not by extractive metrics, but by a deepening loop of attention and care.
VI. The Value of This Centralized Point of Attention
At the heart of the LWM is the belief that a centralized platform—designed not to monopolize, but to harmonize—can serve as a profound source of value. In a world fractured by siloed systems, overwhelmed by choice, and driven by the attention economy, there is immense power in creating a single locus through which individuals can plan, manage, and reflect upon their domestic lives. Centralization, in this context, drives coherence. It establishes a meaningful throughline that connects the fragments of contemporary life into something intentional, navigable, and enduring.
Such a centralized point of focus functions first and foremost as a bridge: between one’s dreams and one’s reality. It structures ambition, helps refine desire, and provides the tools to actualize both. It enables individuals to envision not just what they want their spaces to look like, but what kind of life they want to live within them. It also connects people to all the entities involved in shaping that life—landlords, architects, furniture makers, contractors, maintenance professionals, insurance providers, delivery services. By creating a shared interface between these parties, the LWM delivers utility that is mutual: simplifying workflows, improving outcomes, and reducing miscommunication across the ecosystem of the home.
This centralized model becomes a scaffold for community identity and continuity. When people build and refine their world within the LWM, they are both organizing logistics and creating meaning. The model becomes a narrative framework through which individuals can express who they are, what they value, and how they’ve grown. Over time, it accumulates personal and collective history: stories embedded in spaces, objects, projects, and transitions. That continuity—preserved through digital memory and physical context—creates community bonds that are not transactional, but cultural. It offers the emotional resonance that people increasingly crave in a world defined by speed, anonymity, and ephemerality.
This logic extends to the intergenerational. The LWM becomes a platform for the passing on of knowledge, assets, and vision. Beyond financial, intergenerational wealth is spatial, material, and narrative. Families can preserve and share the story of their homes, their objects, their decisions. Children inherit more than assets. They inherit understanding. Elders are honored both through memory and through the sustained life of the things and spaces they curated. In this sense, the LWM becomes a living archive—a record of how lives were lived and how homes were shaped.
The value of such a system cuts across sectors. It becomes a foundational layer for an entire economic model—sustainable, generative, and beloved. It is no longer a digital platform competing for fleeting attention. It is a persistent companion, a repository of personal history, a tool of agency, and a marketplace of relevance. In the late capitalist context, it reconfigures commodity fetishism and the image economy—not by rejecting them, but by redirecting their logic toward substance. Rather than accumulating things for status, members build a world that reflects intention and imagination. This integration of physical and digital, historical and real-time, leads to deeper engagement and value. Unlike traditional commerce, value here is symbiotic. Revenue and profit emerge from something that is not extractive, but additive: the enhancement of life.
