When we first learn something new, it feels permanent. A good conversation, a sharp insight, a concept that finally clicks. It seems as though this knowledge will stay etched in our minds, ready whenever we need it.
That feeling is misleading. As time passes, and especially as new information and new emotional states pour in, the original piece of knowledge becomes harder to reach. It is like a book slowly sinking into the depths of a vast library in the mind. The knowledge fades, and eventually even the psychological imprint it left behind starts to dissolve.
What survives, if anything, is the path back. When a situation demands that piece of knowledge, the route to it is what matters. If we know the way, we can retrieve it and use it. If we do not, it might as well never have existed.
How much we forget
We underestimate how much we forget and how easily we lose track of things. In my experience there is a stark difference between passively listening to something and actively diagramming it, pulling out the main points and pinning them somewhere visible. By abstracting an idea and connecting it to things we already know, we anchor it more firmly in our consciousness.
This is why I care so much about notation, and about big surfaces: whiteboards, walls, and their digital counterparts. They are not decoration around a thinking process. They are part of the thinking process.
The power of proximity
What has always fascinated me is the power of proximity. Simply placing two things side by side can spark new ideas and connections. We are connection-making machines. Items modestly placed next to each other can trigger emotions, evoke senses, and imply meanings that neither carried alone.
Reading a wall of images and notes feels effortless, but it seems to rest on visual machinery far older than writing. I cannot claim to understand the underlying mechanisms, and I doubt anyone fully does. What we can do is pay attention to what happens when we experiment with graphic and textual information on a large canvas.
Fill a wall with the fragments of a project and something shifts. We can layer connections, ideas, assumptions, feelings, and notations until the material starts talking back. Patterns and relationships appear that were not visible before.
There is a certain romance to these walls. In thriller and detective films, it is the obsessive character who pins photographs and string across a wall to work through a case. Strip away the drama and it is simply note-taking with a richer medium. The wall breaks free from linear notes and helps us find connections that are normally very remote from each other.
Rearranging the story
The other quality I value in this format is reconfigurability. Just as we can reconfigure perspectives in our minds, we can rearrange the elements on a wall and change the narrative. It works the way letters work: the same set of symbols, ordered differently, produces entirely different meanings.
In architecture and industrial design this is everyday practice. Studios pin drawings, references, and photographs on walls to present and explore a project. Every reviewer walks the wall in their own order and assembles their own version of the story. The format invites non-linear reading in a way a linear document cannot.
A wall frozen in time
Years ago I was working with an architecture company on an expo competition. After several weeks of concept design we had produced a massive number of digital files and folders across many competing concepts. The design team was struggling to keep track of them all, and explaining our progress to newcomers had become genuinely difficult.
So I printed a great deal of paper and built a pinwall presentation. It significantly improved our process. We could finally see the whole project at once, walk along it, point at things, and argue in front of it.
Then I noticed the flaw. The moment something is printed, it is frozen in time. As soon as we changed a file, the wall no longer matched the source material. The very thing that made our thinking visible was permanently one step behind our thinking.
That disconnect led me to question the conventional file system and its interface. Why could we not represent our project files visually without breaking the link to the files themselves? What would it take to build something with the tactile qualities of a brainstorming wall that stayed connected to the underlying file system, so that a change in one place appeared in the other?
From walls to landscapes
That question eventually became FileMap, a visual workspace my team and I built. Files and folders are laid out spatially, like a pinwall, while staying linked to the real file system underneath. Any change in the files reflects on the map, and any change on the map reflects in the files. There is a single source of truth, and the wall never freezes.
But the product matters less to me here than the idea behind it. The pinwall works because it matches how minds seem to work. We forget, so we externalize. We connect by proximity, so we arrange. We reinterpret, so we rearrange.
A good knowledge tool should support all three, and most of our digital environments support none of them well. Lists and trees are excellent for machines and adequate for storage, but they are a poor match for the associative, spatial way ideas live in us.
I keep returning to the fundamentals, asking how the medium and our mental responses work together, and how far this medium can still be pushed. The wall was never really about paper and pins. It was about giving thought a landscape to live in.
What does your own thinking look like when it is spread out in front of you, and what have you lost simply because you never had a place to pin it?