Research on engineering design is a core area of concern within engineering education, and a fundamental understanding of how engineering students approach and undertake design is necessary in order to develop effective design models and pedagogies. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on engineering design by addressing a critical, but as yet underexplored, problem: how does the context in which students design shape their design practices? Using a qualitative study comprising of video data of design sessions, focus group interviews with students, and archives of their design work, this research explored how design decisions and actions are shaped by context, specifically the context of higher education. To develop a theoretical explanation for observed behavior, this study used the "nested structuration" framework proposed by Perlow, Gittell, & Katz (2004). This framework explicated how teamwork is shaped by mutually reinforcing relationships at the individual, organizational, and institutional levels. I appropriated this framework to look specifically at how engineering students working on a course-related design project identify constraints that guide their design and how these constraints emerge as students interact while working on the project. I first identified and characterized the parameters associated with the design project from the student perspective and then, through multi-case studies of four design teams, I looked at the role these parameters play in student design practices. This qualitative investigation of first-year engineering student design teams revealed mutual and interconnected relationships between students and the organizations and institutions that they are a part of. In addition to contributing to research on engineering design, this work provides guidelines and practices to help design educators develop more effective design projects by incorporating constraints that enable effective design and learning. Moreover, I found that when appropriated in the context of higher education, multiple sublevels existed within nested structuration's organizational context and included course-level and project-level factors. The implications of this research can be used to improve the design of engineering course projects as well as the design of research efforts related to design in engineering education. / Ph. D.

The starting motivation of this study is to develop an intuitively strong approach to addressing architectural design problems through computational models. Within the scope of the thesis, the complexity of an architectural design problem is modeled computationally by translating the design reasoning into parameters, constraints and the relations between these. Such a model can easily become deterministic and defy its purpose, if it is customized with pre-defined and unchangeable relations between the constraints. This study acknowledges that the relations between design constraints are bound to change in architectural design problems, as exemplified in the graduation project of the author. As such, any computational design model should enable designers to modify the relations between constraints. The model should be open for modifications by the designer. v The findings of the research and the architectural design experiments in the showcase project suggest that this is possible if mass customized sequences of abstract, modifiable and reusable relations link the design constraints with each other in the model. Within the scope of this thesis, the designer actions are mass-customized sequences of relations that may be modified to fit the small design tasks of relating specific design constraints. They relate the constraints in sequence, and are mass customized in an abstract, modifiable and reusable manner. Within this study, they are encoded in Rhino Grasshopper definitions. As these mass customized relations are modifiable, they are seen as a remedy for enabling the designers to build models that meet individual and intuitive needs of the design problems that designers define.