The Media Streams Icon Space is an interface into a hierarchically-indexed "dictionary" of iconic descriptors. At the top, a row of buttons affords access to the system's top-level icon hierarchies: Time, Space, Characters, Objects, Character Actions, Object Actions, Cinematography, Screen Positions, Weather, Subjective Thoughts, Recording Media, Transitions, Relative Positions, and others.

The white upper region of the window is a cascading browser for the icon hierarchies. These hierarchies are actually directed acyclic graphs, in which multiple inheritance is commonplace, and whose nodes are heavily interconnected by a variety of possible taxonomic, partonomic, and lateral relationships. The arrangement of icons from left to right denotes increasing specialization (as in the progression of the icons in the top line, which could be read: "space, geography, land, continent, North America, USA, Northwest States, Washington State"). The vertical arrangement of rows in this browser denotes an orthogonality of descriptive domain; thus, the first row contains descriptors for geographic space, while the second and third rows contain icons for functional and topological divisions of space.

In the lower half of the Icon Space window is the icon palette, a utility for constructing and retrieving iconic sentences. Users can search for their previously-created iconic sentences with a variety of boolean and other search techniques, saving the effort of having to reconstruct these sentences.