The learning sciences community has been a cluster of scholars who, like some of the boundary-crossers, tend less toward questions of policy, or the pragmatics of training the education workforce, and more toward the dual attempt to understand and to change learning in context, or in other words, toward science and design. The first learning sciences conference and journal emerged at Northwestern University as an outgrowth of the Artificial Intelligence in Education community. Participatory design, especially in Northern Europe, had some intersection with these groups, which at the time were as likely to send papers to the Computer Human Interaction conferences as to the mainstream education conferences. At the International Conference of the Learning Sciences in 2014, the theme of 'learning and becoming in practice' heralded not only a theoretical stance toward culture and identity as core aspects of learning, but also had an unprecedented number of sessions in which the political aspects of learning design were considered.