Connections
A connection is either established or it is absent.
Archtivy is only as useful as its connections are trustworthy. So it matters a great deal where each one comes from, and it matters that the difference is visible.
Where connections come from
Stated by the people who made the work
A studio publishes a project and credits the collaborators and the products in it. A brand publishes a product with its category and materials. These are the strongest connections on the platform, because someone with first-hand knowledge asserted them.
Derived from shared attributes
A material, a category, a city. If two projects both specify the same stone, that relationship follows from the records themselves and needs no interpretation.
Suggested by resemblance
In a project photograph, we can surface products that look like what is in the room. This is a suggestion about appearance and nothing more. It is never labelled as a specification, and it never appears where a credited product would.
What we will not do
We do not infer a specification. If a chair in a photograph closely resembles a product in the catalogue, that is not evidence the chair is that product, and presenting it as one would corrupt every genuine credit around it.
We do not fill empty fields with plausible values. A project with no credited products shows no credited products.
We do not publish counts or coverage figures we cannot stand behind. Where the network is thin, the interface shows less rather than implying more.
None of this is caution for its own sake. A discovery platform whose connections cannot be trusted is a worse tool than the scattered pages it set out to replace.
Why gaps stay visible
Most projects on the internet credit their photographer and not their furniture. That is the inheritance Archtivy is working against, and it means many projects here have connections that are incomplete.
Leaving those gaps legible is deliberate. It shows a reader what is known and what is not, and it shows a studio or a brand exactly where their own work would make the network more useful.
Credit what is in your work.
The connections that make discovery useful come from the people who made the projects.