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Systems thinking is an important component of engineering design thinking but one that is often difficult for beginning designers. In this paper, we present an empirically grounded case that sometimes the novice-like design behaviors emerge, not due to a lack of skills/knowledge on part of the student designers, but by the nature of the way the activity is structured and the implicit and explicit messages communicated to the students on the nature of the design task. Our analysis draws on video-records of brainstorming and design review and briefing meetings between students, instructors, and stakeholders in the context of a service-learning course. The project involved designing a treehouse for campers with disabilities. Our analysis flags a central tension participants faced: whether students were expected to create a piecemeal set of disparate design elements, or an integrated overall design concept for the treehouse. We find that an ambiguous framing by stakeholders coupled with a reification of the design as piecemeal through individual moments of activity and conversation, largely produced a framing and a resulting product of piecemeal design.