The phrase "conceive them as" is a perfectly correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you are trying to explain how someone else should think of or view a certain situation, concept, or person. For example, "We need to conceive of the project as a long-term investment, not a quick fix."
They're probably retired now, though I prefer to conceive them as victims of the department's periodic housecleanings.
Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit.
We may object that we have been thinking of the stars as mere bodies, and as units with a serial order indeed but entirely inanimate; but should rather conceive them as enjoying life and action.
Are we to conceive them as a sort of ironclad van...ploughing ponderously onward through hedges of wire, over holes, over trenches to the bewilderment and affright of the Hun?' The hopeful reaction to the new machines naturally spurred interest in how they had been conceived and by whom.
He simply claimed that its experiences would lead his "statue" to first conceive of colours as modifications of its own being, then to conceive them as modifications of its extended sense organs, and finally to conceive them as modifications of external objects (Treatise III.3).
It does not seem to me that the human mind is capable of forming a very distinct conception of both the distinction between the soul and the body and their union; for to do this it is necessary to conceive them as a single thing and at the same time to conceive them as two things; and this is absurd" (28 June 1643, AT III:693, CSMK 227).
These works electrified France's art world, even if Calle had not originally conceived them as art.
Nelsons handles such vast orchestral canvases magnificently, conceiving them as a single irresistible span, yet still managing to make sense of every bit of detail along the way.
Describing himself as a "visual jackdaw," Fletcher conceived them as manifestoes for his belief that, as he put it: "Design is not a thing you do.
Nervi conceived them as concrete vaults, with huge spans, that could be constructed at low cost, and he was commissioned for the project.
