Based on a three-semester design research study, this paper argues the need to redesign online learning environments to better support the representation and sharing of factual, procedural, and conceptual knowledge in order for students to develop their design capabilities. A web-conferencing environment is redesigned so that the modalities facilitate more socio-constructivist pedagogies whereby students co-construct knowledge and share their design thinking. The design-based research methodology explicates how redesign not only allowed more effective student representation and sharing of the different levels of knowledge required for abstraction to occur, but also enabled better teacher assessment and, hence, remediation. On the basis of the emerging findings of the study a set of principles for designing web-conferencing (or other online) environments to support creative design learning is proposed. (Contains 3 figures.)