The author, Kris Gutiérrez, is a learning scientist whose work has centered on understanding the cultural dimensions of learning, with particular interest in understanding how to leverage youths' everyday concepts and practices toward more expansive and equitable forms of learning. Gutiérrez discusses the big ideas that informed her work in literacy and a design-based approach to literacy and broader forms of research on learning that seek to advance a method of inquiry that is organized around imagining what is "not yet," that is, the proleptic property of learning that brings "the end into the beginning." The work this paper addresses argues that understanding learning and design in ways that are consequential to all youth requires us to learn to see differently. It is an argument about seeing work with youth and communities in ways that can help education researchers see ingenuity instead of incompetence and inability, to see resilience instead of deficit, and to imagine futures with youth from nondominant communities.