The paper draws on a series of studies of design teams working on the creation and evaluation of novel complex learning spaces: spaces in which students’ activity is situated and supported by rich mixtures of material and digital tools and resources. In most of the cases observed, students also played a substantial role in co-configuring the learning spaces and/or the learning tasks they were set and the ways they worked with other students. The complexity of the design challenges involved revealed the inadequacy of

normative models for design for learning. In other words, the people creating new spaces for hybrid learning are often doing so in ways that go beyond the capacities of existing design models. The paper draws on analyses of real-world design practice to advance and illustrate an argument for higher-level, more abstract, descriptions of how such work is done, and how design lessons learnt might be more easily shared. The empirical research informing the paper was mostly undertaken in university settings, but the practical implications are of wider relevance to people who are professionally involved in shaping novel learning spaces in other areas of education and training.