SoA Associate Professor Simon Bussiere spoke to a live audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members in the Fall 2023 Zube Lecture Series at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on October 05, 2023.

“Concepts are magic. A strong one is like having a design superpower, shaping the course of events and influencing the direction of a project. With so much complexity at the outset, concepts can grab our attention. They can hold our focus and help us express shared values too, expanding meaningful dialogue across boundaries and acting as a beacon to follow. We know they tend to form early in the design process when specifics are low-resolution. They typically follow analysis and precede a rational site-framework. But, are there rules? Like, what are the conditions required to make a “good” one? Each context and situation is unique, yet this bewildering dilemma is evidently universal, cyclical, and recurring for every designer, every project. This talk is about searching for the fundamental patterns in conceptual design. Expecting to find answers and best-practices, I instead have found that more often than not, a concept results through an inherently heuristic, inefficient, and beautiful adventure in framing, forming, and translation.”

View the talk at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkOxW9hpRlM