First entering your own playpen, you’ll be able to start drawing freehand.

Drawing curved figures will raise a new topic. Straight or sharply-angled figures will make new statements. Once the figure is complete (when touch or mouse button is released), a text field appears for you to populate the new topic or statement.

Once you have concepts, you can then link them together.

Each concept also has a type, which can be set in the context pane at any point before publishing/saving the concept for the first time. Once saved, the concept’s type can no longer be changed.

Placement

If for whatever reason you find it more convenient to place topics or statements at certain spots in the playpen, you can control what kind of concept will be placed using the ‘Raise a Topic’ and ‘Make a Statement’ buttons. The buttons are beside the ‘Freehand’ button at the bottom of the view in the Draw context.

Often once a new topic is raised, one will make a statement about it. For the sake of ease, by default the placement tool will automatically ‘advance’ to the ’next’ type. That is, once a topic is raised, the next placement will be a statement. And once a statement is made, freehand drawing will resume.

By mouse

Closer at hand are the same buttons in the context menu.

By keyboard

Raise topics with the shortcut Shift-T, and make statements with Shift-Space.

Chaining

When you want to create multiple concepts at once, it can be useful to create them as chains. Holding down Shift while drawing or placing concepts will create a chain of concepts. Once Shift is released, text fields will appear one-by-one after setting the text for each idea in the chain. While the chain tool creates links by default, these are easily discarded by pressing Escape when the corresponding text field appears.

Note that pressing Escape here for a concept’s text field will discard the links touching it.