Knowledge is non-hierarchical, but the tools for organizing it usually are. Obsidian and Softspace both offer ways to structure and link ideas, but they impose rigid structures or keep exploration flat. Memory Labs needed to hold a large, loosely connected body of information and stay legible while doing it. The tool had to work in two directions. As a personal archive, it needed to capture how ideas connect, not just that they connect. The nature and context of a relationship between two nodes carries as much meaning as the link itself. That meant finding a way to record, manage, and retrieve a lot of information without burying the user in it. As a sharing platform, the reference point was a Wikipedia deep dive: roaming from one domain to the next without a fixed path. But walking into someone else's intellectual world gets disorienting fast. The interface had to allow open-ended exploration while keeping a high-level view available on request.