Studying Visual Evidence from Using Physical Space to Think

This paper investigates how people use physical space, free from digital constraints, to organize thoughts and ideas. Such spatial arrangements commonly support sensemaking, idea generation, and data understanding. We collected over 300 publicly shared images capturing these activities collected from real-world contexts. Our visual analysis identifies a small set of recurring spatial patterns such as clusters, grids as well as the techniques people use to build and adapt them, such as color coding, directional lines, and selective rule-following. We discuss how these practices can inform the design of more expressive and adaptable digital spatially-aware tools that better support the diverse ways people think with space.