In response to these general challenges, this paper reports a case study of the work of two education organizations--a university graduate program and a zoo education program-- to support learning within an educational organization while also exploring how to connect learning opportunities beyond the organization, across a metropolitan learning landscape. To engage in joint work, we enlisted the longstanding idea of a collaboratory, or “center without walls” (NRC, 1993; Wulf, 1993; cf. Muff, 2014; 2016), as a guiding concept to describe our work. A collaboratory organizes social and technological infrastructure that, in turn, gives rise to distributed networks of shared data and collaborative research. While new technological infrastructure has only augmented initial visions from the early 1990s, the kinds and degrees of knowledge generation, mobilization, and utilization envisioned a quarter century ago remain underdeveloped in education (Tseng, 2012), particularly among colleges of education (Fishman, Anderson, Tefera, & Zuiker, 2018; Zuiker et al., 2019). Therefore, design thinking (DT) is one approach that can shift problem- finding and -solving from researcher-led projects that organize a one-way process of disseminating scholarship to education stakeholders towards loosely structured design-led projects with the potential to organize a multi- way process of exchange among stakeholders.