White Space at Home: Why the Domestic Realm is Tech’s Next Frontier

I. Introduction: The Blind Spot in Tech

In the long arc of technological progress, certain domains have been consistently prioritized. Industry, commerce, entertainment, and enterprise have all seen sweeping innovation. From cloud infrastructure to mobile computing, generative AI to logistics automation, vast intellectual and financial capital has been invested to model, optimize, and scale these systems.

One space remains conspicuously under-modeled: the home. Despite being the most intimate and materially complex environment in our lives, the domestic realm has remained a kind of blind spot in the digital age. It is a space filled with care, labor, culture, consumption, and memory—yet tech has largely treated it as either a site of passive consumption (entertainment, e-commerce) or surveillance (security systems, smart speakers). The result is a fragmented ecosystem of point solutions that do not cohere into a meaningful infrastructure for everyday life.

This white paper proposes that the home is the next frontier for technological modeling. It is a critical white space in the deepest sense: an under-recognized, underserved, and high-potential domain where new forms of intelligence and infrastructure can emerge. We believe that investing in technology supporting the home can play a critical role in enhancing our everyday lives while also fostering long-term stewardship. We believe this requires a new kind of model, one that goes beyond data or automation and seeks to understand space, time, behavior, and meaning. It would be a model driven by care rather than a desire to control our daily lives and extract a fee in the process. We call this a Large World Model for Domestic Life. And, as incumbents try to make this space increasingly gray by prolonging antiquated ad-driven attention economies, now is the time to build it.

II. Defining White Space in Technology

In strategic terms, “white space” refers to areas of opportunity that remain unclaimed, unseen, or underserved—gaps where existing systems fail to meet real needs. These can be market gaps, behavioral gaps, or infrastructural voids. In product development, white space is where innovation thrives—where the next platform, tool, or standard might emerge. White space is not only the absence of solutions. It is the presence of potential that has not yet been adequately mapped.

In the domestic context, the white space is profound. Unlike the quantified landscapes of finance, healthcare, logistics, or productivity—each in the process of being transformed by layers of software and artificial intelligence—the home has never been systemically modeled. It exists outside of enterprise software stacks, outside of formalized planning frameworks, and largely outside of data-rich behavioral modeling. What does exist is fragmented: isolated devices, shopping platforms, rental listings, instruction manuals, renovation tools, and lifestyle content—none of which speak the same language or share a common model of domestic life.

This lack of structure is not due to lack of importance. The home is where much of human life happens—where we rest, work, care, clean, cook, organize, reflect, and develop our most meaningful connections. But because it is private, variable, emotional, and heterogeneous, it has historically eluded technical abstraction. Calling it white space identifies a new infrastructural frontier. The systems that occupy this space fall short of addressing its full complexity or honoring the dignity it deserves. There is no baseline representation of domestic behavior across life phases. There is no connective tissue between consumption, care, and planning. And, there is no platform through which individuals can meaningfully coordinate the use, transformation, and stewardship of their living space over time.

This situation presents both an opportunity and an obligation. To serve the domestic space requires more than apps and devices. It requires a new way of understanding and gathering the data to drive spatial understanding that can, in turn, motivate action. In this sense, it would be a new orientation to the world resulting in enhanced agency. This model would respect and understand the hidden order of home life in order to deliver intelligent, adaptive, and personalized support—both for individual tasks as well as for the fullness of everyday living.

III. The Complexity of Home

To understand why the domestic realm has remained a white space in tech, we must first acknowledge its inherent complexity. The home is a convergence of many interdependent systems, each layered with personal meaning, cultural expression, and logistical challenge. It is lived, modified, inherited, and reimagined continuously. Unlike a factory floor or retail supply chain—where inputs and outputs can be quantified and optimized—the home resists reduction. It is dynamic, non-linear, and deeply personal. And yet, its complexity is precisely what makes it deserving of more intelligent support. 

The home operates across multiple dimensions:

1. A Material System

The home contains and organizes a vast range of physical objects: furniture, tools, textiles, appliances, heirlooms, consumables. Each has a story—how it was chosen, how it is used, how long it lasts, and what happens to it when it’s no longer needed. The volume of material that flows in and out of the home rivals that of many small businesses, but without the tools or oversight to manage it efficiently. 

2. A Relational Space

Homes are social environments. They hold individuals, couples, families, roommates, pets, guests, and care workers. These relationships shape how space is used and how tasks are distributed. A home is rarely designed for one person’s needs alone, and its configuration is often in quiet negotiation between the needs of many.

3. A Temporal System

The home is not static. It is shaped by time—by seasons, routines, life events, and transitions. From morning rituals to yearly maintenance cycles, from the arrival of a child to the departure of a parent, domestic life unfolds in rhythms that are both intimate and predictable, but rarely supported by intelligent planning systems.

4. A Cultural Artifact

Beyond function, the home is a canvas of personal and cultural identity. It reflects values, memories, aesthetics, and aspirations. It carries the imprint of its inhabitants, as well as the traditions and constraints of its location, construction, and history. Style choices are not just visual—they are acts of authorship, preservation, and adaptation.

This multidimensionality makes the home hard to model and so important to model well. Today’s tech tools tend to isolate one of these dimensions while ignoring the rest. A smart thermostat may optimize temperature, but it doesn’t understand daily routines. A furniture marketplace may offer options, but not fit, memory, or meaning. A moving app may facilitate logistics, but not emotional or spatial continuity. The home cannot be served by single-purpose tools or static representations. It demands a system that can adapt to its full complexity—a model capable of learning, linking, and evolving alongside its inhabitants. This is the foundation upon which our model for domestic life is built.

IV. The Cost of Neglect

The failure to model and support domestic life has consequences for convenience as well as quality of life, sustainability, equity, and emotional well-being. When technology ignores the home, the burden falls on individuals and families to fill the gap with improvisation, repeated effort, and personal sacrifice. The result is a system that is inefficient, inequitable, and ultimately exhausting.

Too often, we waste energy, time, and resources. Without integrated planning tools or visibility into how spaces and objects are used, people make suboptimal decisions. They purchase items that don’t fit or don’t last, duplicate things they already own, forget maintenance cycles or losing track of repair history, and consume too much energy, water, and materials without realizing it. Without structure, even the most conscientious households struggle to reduce waste or optimize use.

Friction in everyday decision-making is all too common. Much of the emotional burden of home life comes from the decisions that must be made. We must decide what to keep, buy, sell, repair, store, or donate, how to arrange a room or prepare for a transition, and when to act and who to call for help. These decisions are often made under pressure—during moves, crises, or life changes—with limited information and no structured memory. The result is anxiety, delay, and error. What could be thoughtful planning becomes reactive problem-solving.

Invisible labor leads to emotional strain. Domestic work—whether logistical, emotional, or aesthetic—is real labor. It is often unpaid, undervalued, and disproportionately carried by women and caregivers. The lack of digital infrastructure to support this labor obscures its value and increases its load. Technology that sees only the transaction, not the context, perpetuates this invisibility. Platforms designed for speed and scale can overlook the nuance, effort, and relational work embedded in domestic life.

Cultural and material displacement occurs more that we would like. As families move, downsize, or inherit spaces and objects, the lack of continuity in digital systems makes it easy to lose both material value and cultural meaning. Furniture with history is discarded, home archives are lost, and inherited homes are stripped of their character. What remains is often a shell—efficient, but hollow. Without a structure that honors memory, supports transitions, and helps preserve embedded stories, we lose more than convenience—we lose cultural continuity. This is the real cost of neglect. It leads to wasted resources as well as lost dignity, strained relationships, and the erosion of care. 

V. White Space, Not Empty Space

The home is full of activity, meaning, objects, rituals, memories, and needs. It is dense with value that has not been modeled, supported, or even properly acknowledged by most digital systems. Historically, technology has advanced by seeking domains that are legible to its logic: measurable, scalable, and programmable. The home, with its fluid routines and deeply human subtleties, has resisted such legibility. As a result, tech’s engagement with domestic life has been mostly superficial—focused on surveillance (security cameras), control (smart lights), or consumption (shopping feeds). These tools treat the home as a set of devices or transactions, rather than as an interconnected ecosystem. This reductionism leaves people unsupported in precisely the areas that matter most: coordinating care across generations or households; managing transitions like aging in place, having a child, or downsizing;sustaining spaces with limited time, skill, or support; and making decisions that are not just rational, but emotional and cultural

The lack of intelligent systems doesn’t mean people aren’t working hard to manage their homes. It means they are doing it without sufficient structure, foresight, or assistance. They are reinventing systems, rediscovering insights, and redoing labor that could be streamlined, remembered, and shared. Rather than inserting more tech into the home for its own sake, we should reimagine what tech is for—to shift from devices that automate discrete functions toward models that understand and support human behavior in context. The Large World Model for Domestic Life is designed with this shift in mind. It begins with the assumption that the home is already full of intelligence and then draws upon the tacit knowledge of how people live, the relational logic of their decisions, and the emotional clarity that can come when their environments remember and support them. 

VI. A New Kind of Infrastructure: Modeling Domestic Life

To serve the domestic realm with the dignity and depth it deserves, we must move beyond discrete tools and isolated datasets. We need an infrastructure capable of capturing and supporting the full breadth of domestic life—its spatial configurations, temporal rhythms, material flows, relational patterns, and cultural significance. This is the role of the Large World Model for Domestic Life: a system that avoids reducing the home to a set of tasks or products and instead renders it as a living, dynamic environment. The LWM builds on large language models, vision models, and spatial intelligence while reorienting their purpose. It does not seek to replicate human cognition. It seeks to augment domestic agency, illuminating what’s possible, organizing what’s complex, and remembering what matters. Key features of this infrastructure include:

1. Spatial Intelligence

The model constructs persistent, dynamic representations of physical space. It goes beyond the geometry of rooms to understand the activities and meanings assigned to them. It understands proximity, adjacency, and function: where people cook, rest, gather, and work. 

2. Lifecycle-Aware Planning

Domestic life is not static. People move through stages—forming households, raising children, downsizing, caregiving, grieving, renovating, inheriting. The LWM is designed to anticipate and support these transitions, offering foresight, coordination, and continuity across time.

3. Material and Behavioral Memory

The system retains knowledge about the home’s history—what was purchased, repaired, repurposed, replaced, inherited. It understands the meaning of objects and patterns of behavior, enabling recommendations that reflect long-term value instead of only tracing momentary trends.

4. Personalization Without Fragmentation

The model learns from individual and household preferences—styles, routines, capacities—without locking users into siloed, non-transferable systems. It adapts while preserving coherence across platforms, services, and life events.

5. Interoperability with the Real World

The LWM is not a simulation—it is a connective layer. It integrates with marketplaces, service providers, planners, and physical infrastructure. It enables actionable recommendations, guided decision-making, and coordinated effort across stakeholders.

6. Cultural and Local Sensitivity

Crucially, the model is built to respect the local—both in geographic terms as well as in cultural, historical, and architectural nuance. It does not flatten context. It adapts to it, learns from it, and honors its specific character.

In this way, the LWM becomes a new kind of infrastructure. It becomes a semantic and spatial backbone for domestic life. Like roads or electrical grids, it provides support and coordination for all that happens within and around the home—but with intelligence and empathy embedded at every level. This effort centers on creating a digital framework grounded in the reality of home—one that captures the full depth of physical and emotional life that unfolds within it.

VII. Use Cases and Early Signals

A deep need for the Large World Model for Domestic Life is already visible in the daily struggles and creative workarounds that individuals and households employ to manage their homes. These moments point to real-world use cases where even modest structure and support can produce significant value. 

We will all plan a move or embark on a home renovation at some point. Today, even simple relocations are logistical and emotional hurdles. What to take, what to leave, what will fit, what needs repair, how to time the stages—it’s a multi-layered puzzle with no integrated system. The LWM provides: a persistent memory of objects and spaces, spatial recommendations and layout planning, coordination of contractors, movers, and services, and budgeting and inventory continuity across locations. The result is a system that ensures smoother logistics while also preserving continuity of identity and intention across space and time.

Many of us will live with friends or extended family at some point. Quite a few will help others transition between types of living space to accommodate aging. Multigenerational homes, caregiving arrangements, roommates, and hybrid workspaces require adaptive spatial planning. The LWM can support rotating configurations and shared rooms, track routines and preferences across individuals, align services and care schedules without friction, and recommend changes as needs evolve This empowers households to live more flexibly and provide greater support to family members–all without defaulting to rigid architectural or lifestyle norms.

Even if you are not a collector, it is likely the case that you or someone you loves appreciates an environment that reflects their taste and has at least one or two objects they care deeply about. Homeowners often lack structured memory of what they own, where it came from, and how to care for it. The LWM helps document provenance and material metadata, provide alerts for care, repair, or resale, match new items to existing aesthetic, size, and sustainability goals, and surface emotional or cultural connections that inform decision-making. This promotes long-term stewardship over short-term accumulation, aligning commerce with care and identity.

Over the course of our lives, we will all experience a range of lifecycle transitions. Whether it’s welcoming a child, aging in place, downsizing, or inheriting a home, life changes are often met with reactive scrambling. The LWM offers scenario modeling for space and schedule changes, visualizations of future needs and timelines, resource lists, product and service recommendations, and cultural sensitivity to memory, legacy, and adaptation. These tools allow users to prepare with intention, rather than react under pressure.

Ultimately, we all hope to sustain a beautiful and supportive home over time. Homes require care—seasonal maintenance, utility planning, upgrades. Most of this is remembered manually or scattered across documents and service providers. The LWM can maintain a living archive of work done and needed, automate seasonal or periodic checklists, surface relevant products or services based on timing and usage, and coordinate between stakeholders (owners, renters, managers, family). This brings structure to what has long been an invisible form of work—and preserves the value and livability of the home for generations.

These examples are only a starting point. The true white space lies in the connections between tasks—the relationships, sequences, and context that give them meaning. The Large World Model provides this connective structure as a layered, adaptive framework designed to translate personal life into coherent, actionable form.

VIII. The Current Conditions That Make This Possible

The vision of a meaningful, intelligent infrastructure for domestic life has long seemed out of reach—too complex, too private, too variable to be modeled. But that has changed. A convergence of cultural, technological, and economic shifts now makes the Large World Model for Domestic Life not only possible, but necessary.

First, significant advances in AI and spatial computing have occurred over the past five years. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning—particularly in multi-modal models that combine language, vision, and spatial reasoning—enable systems to perceive and understand the physical world more like humans do. Spatial twins, object recognition, generative design, and behavioral modeling can now be woven into unified systems that interpret the home as a coherent, living environment—rather than a collection of isolated data points. At the same time, a shift has occurred toward digital planning in everyday life. People are increasingly comfortable using digital tools to plan and manage their lives—meal planning, calendar coordination, budget tracking, fitness monitoring. This growing fluency creates a readiness for more intelligent support in the home, especially when that support is helpful, respectful, and non-intrusive.

These trends are accompanied by the rise of distributed, transitional living, and nomadic modes of living. Homes are no longer fixed or uniform. People move more frequently, live in multiple households, and adapt spaces for remote work, caregiving, or hybrid family structures. The 20th-century assumption of a nuclear household in a permanent residence no longer applies. What’s needed is a system that can move with people, adapt to changing needs, and provide continuity across spaces and life phases.

Many at the forefront of these trends also practice sustainable, thoughtful consumption. Younger generations in particular are rejecting disposable consumerism in favor of sustainability, repair, reuse, and traceability. They want to know where things come from, how long they’ll last, and how they’ll be reused or passed on. This creates both a cultural mandate and a market opening for a system that can help households make informed, meaningful material decisions over time.

Recent events have also deepened the cultural embrace of meaningful spaces. There is a renewed appreciation for the home as a place of grounding, expression, and care. The pandemic, in particular, reawakened many people’s relationship to their living environments. This cultural shift creates an opening for digital support that emphasizes coherence, well-being, and belonging—rather than novelty or control.

Finally, we are witnessing a maturity of ecosystem infrastructure. The surrounding technical ecosystem is finally mature enough to support a system like the LWM. APIs, open datasets, interoperable marketplaces, geospatial services, object libraries, and hardware integrations can now be stitched together with intelligence. What was once siloed can now be unified—if we begin with the right model.

Taken together, these conditions signal a profound readiness for more than technological advancement. They point to a shift in how people relate to the digital systems that support them—a relationship that is reciprocal, adaptive, and grounded in the realities of daily life rather than confined to the virtual. We are no longer waiting for the tools to emerge. The tools are here. What’s needed now is vision and investment in this future.

IX. Claiming the White Space Responsibly

To claim the domestic white space responsibly, we must adopt new principles of engagement—principles that guide both design and deployment:

1. Build with Respect for Privacy and Consent

Domestic life is intimate by nature. Modeling it requires trust. The system must be designed to work with the user’s knowledge, participation, and control. Intelligence should be transparent and accountable.

2. Place the Human at the Center

The ultimate goal is to make people feel more capable, confident, and supported in their domestic lives. The model is meant to adapt to each person’s goals, values, and style, offering guidance without imposing its own logic.

3. Serve the Full Lifecycle

Many technologies are designed for a moment—a transaction, a task, a metric. The LWM is designed to function across time. It learns and evolves with the household. It remembers, anticipates, and supports transitions—bringing continuity and clarity across decades rather than days.

4. Honor Local Knowledge and Cultural Diversity

Layout, rhythm, and meaning of individual homes differ considerably. The system must be capable of adapting to local traditions, materials, aesthetics, and needs, rather than flattening them into uniform templates. It must learn from the world as it is rather than imposing a universal standard of living.

5. Invite Participation, Not Passivity

A responsible model enhances human decision-making by offering tools to explore, plan, and refine. It empowers users to engage actively rather than passively. The future of domestic life calls for participation, and the model must be designed to reflect that.

6. Align Commerce with Care

The home is a site of both consumption and stewardship. The LWM can support healthier, more sustainable commerce by connecting value with longevity, repairability, traceability, and emotional fit. It can help households make fewer and better decisions.

In short, to claim this white space responsibly is to create a new social contract between people and the systems that support them at home—a contract built on clarity, continuity, and care. This is a design challenge as well as an ethical challenge.

X. A Home That Knows You

Beyond outlining a gap in the market, this paper has pointed to a deeper gap in how we model the world. The home, with all its nuance, messiness, and meaning is a vital frontier that deserves respect. Intelligence should be applied here to strengthen care, enhance clarity, and preserve continuity. To build a Large World Model for Domestic Life is to propose a different kind of future. One where intelligence strengthens human intention and agency. One where commerce honors memory, sustainability, and personal relevance. One where space is organized with depth, context, and understanding. And one where people live with greater meaning, not just greater efficiency

This redefines ownership. It moves away from platforms controlling data, systems directing behavior, or brands dictating the aesthetic of home. Instead, it centers domestic agency—equipping people with the tools to shape their environments with coherence, dignity, and lasting care. A home that knows you is not a home that watches you. It is a home that listens, remembers, and grows with you. It is a home supported by intelligence and authored by you. We believe the time has come to fill the white space with structure, stewardship, and legacy that supports the rhythms of everyday living. The next frontier of technology will surround us in the world in which we live. It’s time we started actively building this future.