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Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer’s repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods or how these schema relate to specific epistemological patterns of engagement. In this research paper, we report a multiple case study, capturing the experiences of four advanced undergraduate UX design students at a large research-intensive institution. Through an interview study and subsequent analysis, we describe the wide variety of organizing metaphors that these students used to frame their understanding and performance of design methods, including both principles they used to consider methods as knowledge, and the ways in which these organizing principles impacted their practice of design. We conclude with recommendations for further research on the uptake of methods-focused competence in HCI education and practice.