E "Eddy" Edwards
The evolving process (as in, a process that is allowed to evolve to meet changing design and project needs as the design is developed in a natural fashion as needed) that brings together diverse sets of factors — personal schema, physical needs, external story or context budget, footprint constraints, personalities of the designers and those for who the design is being executed, the need to mention the client's name early and often, etc. — with the specific intention of presenting opportunities for immersive, first-person (including groups of "first-persons" having individual experiences in a group) multisensory, multischemic experiences.
Schema: mental structures, conscious ideas and unconscious needs. People use their personal schema to organize their knowledge and memories and provide a framework for understanding the world from one moment to the next.
The end result of concept design presents guests (or visitors or users or audience members or whatever nomenclature is applicable and acceptable) with a mediated kit of experiential elements — the intended story, message, lesson, or experiences — over which they can imagine their personal schema that allows them to take ownership of the larger story (or lesson or experience) and see themselves as being at the center of that story or experience.
In other words, it's doing whatever it takes to give people a good story to which they can relate, framed by whatever needs are important — setting, message, etc. — to the project at hand.
Concept design is more than assembling a kit of ideas to tell a story and create some experiences. It's about developing a deep understanding of who the guests are, what they want and need, what they've already done ("already" being anywhere from previous 2 seconds to, possibly, the previous span of their lives) before they arrive at a place, what they want and need to do while there, what the "story" (or client, as the case may be) wants them to do, and how they will leave it behind to move on to their next thing.
Namely, to go and spend more money in the gift shop than they originally intended.
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