Design Concept

Being a student architect, everyone including me has done the conceptual level of design wrong. Concept can be taken from anything found anywhere. It could be physically something, or a smell, or a color, or a text, or place, or even an animal. There is no prescribed source for thinking of a concept. The process of thinking and working out a concept into a design is the very important matter that highlights the design in which you are working. 

A design concept is the very basic idea and the foundation of a design from which design developments happens throughout a period of time. After you have collected and compiled data for your project, you have to work these data through the concept of your choice. 

I have seen many people developing designs based on an element and use them directly as it is. For example, someone says, my concept is the fruit called Banana and this person tend to build a building in the shape of a Banana. Not that this design had seen a bad working process, but it is meaningless. It should only need a root to something or the other based on what it is.

A design concept should be very flexible to the design brief. There are possible situations where a concept is drifting too far away from the intended topic. Whatever you make changes, the essence of your own concept should be found in the design no matter how had you work on that.