The African Contemporary Institute of Design (ACID) is a multidisciplinary, critically evaluating unit of RUBAN for thinking at various current levels that is mostly anchored in the African context. The effort comes from the need for the African continent to radically engage architecture, planning, and economics, in new, increasingly pragmatic ways for development.
The motive transcends merely breaking rules to the pristine essence of pushing the boundaries of current knowledge and the impact that comes from the operationalisation of such knowledge. As a practice unit of RUBAN, clusters of ACID develop research- driven insights, services, and solutions to governments, firms, and individuals in directed thematic set of areas. The collaborative approach of ACID to issues of Architecture, Planning, Design, and Economics makes it flexible in methodological schemes. It is also positionally orchestrated for garnering the best resources for performance across professional industries and value chains.
Upon inception as a research and consultancy platform, ACID’s primary task was to evolve Architecture, Planning, Economics and Design to meet up with the tempo and demands of contemporary Africa, drawing capacity from a highly multidisciplinary base. In 2011, ACID was founded by the Nigerian architect and development economist Stephen Ajadi, with the expectation of unifying the design practice with scholarship and pedagogy for sustainable development. It started as a pedagogical cluster, developing ideas and informally delivering education to curious cohorts across schools and organisations with overlapping interests.
It later developed by building up an expertise level to the point of international engagement and consultancy. The institute evolved as a unit of the African architecture and planning practice RUBAN, and it is currently expanding its operations with locations straddling African cities and the suburbs. This aligns with RUBAN’s notion of unravelling, explaining, connecting and reconnecting the rural and the urban across a multitude of contexts. ACID drives the research processes of RUBAN as well as projects that significantly overlap development economics and sustainable development. ACID pushes programs and projects that oscillate knowledge comfort zones with a penchant for new experiences coupled with the discovery and indulgence of various methods and avenues of investigation. ACID is highly experimental in its pedagogy but also realistic in its concerns which may or may not be conventional.
