Two-Dimensional Positioning as Visual Thinking

People depend on various external representations in various design situations. These external representations are necessary at the time of creation in early stages of a design task, as they help the designer visualize what they are thinking and continue with their task in the process of reflection-in-action. Designers in domains such as architecture have drawn diagrams, or sketches, as the external representations. We take writing and programming as two example domains, and argue that two-dimensional positioning serve the same purpose for these domains as diagrams do for architectural design. We describe two tools, ART for writing and RemBoard for component-based programming, which help writers or programmers visualize what they are thinking through positioning parts of writing or software components on a two-dimensional space. We examine the issues that are necessary for this, and explore how they were handled in the two tools.