This short note summarizes a National Science Foundation proposal completed during a research residency at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. The goal is to communicate to a wider audience the need for a human-centered information space as a place to think in the new information age. A human-centered information space is both an idea, and a computational environment. It is the idea of a spatial cognitive workspace—a desktop for intellectual activity—reified as a computational environment that actively supports information-based work.