The purpose of the present article is to describe the virtual design activity of students of textiles, as an object-oriented process. The first authors are teachers of design in a university setting. We will examine how networked learning environments can be used to support collaborative designing and describe some of our experiences of supporting collaborative product design with such environments. The authors will analyze the mediated nature of craft and design activity by introducing three design courses. These were courses, respectively, for designing clothes for premature babies, conference bags and tactile books for visually impaired children; they constitute a continuum in terms of being design experiments, each of which highlights certain perspectives on the virtual design process. The purpose of our design experiments is set up, foster, and investigate an iterative design process, in which previous observations and lessons can be applied to development of educational settings and practices. We have identified a number of barriers that need to be overcome in order to facilitate students collaborative process. The authors will examine how students create a shared design object, to what extent users can be involved in the design process (participatory designing), and expert knowledge utilized. We propose that networked environments, designed to facilitate collaborative building of knowledge and sharing of expertise, provide substantial support both for creating the shared design object and organizing the collaborative design process.