The CDIW focuses on designing human-centered information spaces. This 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 the coordination of information-based work. Specifically, the information environment should develop awareness of the history and structure of a user's action: how she accomplishes activities through discrete tasks across devices, programs, and working sessions. Through use, information in the environment accumulates structure and context: not only who accessed it and when, but concurrent activity and semantic relationships to other related information and activities. The context and history of activity should drive the behavior of information. To the user, her information should seem alive, have awareness, know where it came from, how it got there, what it means---and behave accordingly. It is important to emphasize that the human-centered information space will not replace the user's ecosystem of documents and applications, but be a separate space linked to them, acting as a home, a control center, a multi-modal but fundamentally `spatial workshop' where information across applications will converge with visual features and active behaviors that support the user in not only completing her tasks, but accomplishing overarching activities.