Sahar Tai-SealeCommunity Systems · Stewardship · Public Learning

Design-build stewardship · culture · community labs

In Development

AACDI

People study a place, make art, share skills, and design a room they can actually use together.

AACDI

Cultural + spatial resources

Follow this workAll projects
Read the technical one-sentence description

Art, Architecture & Cooperative Design Initiative. Create culture. Create community. Design-build stewardship, culture, and community labs.

Intergenerational neighbors, including a wheelchair user, gathered around maps, photographs, material samples, and a small site model inside a warm earthen community room
A grassroots doorway into AACDI: neighbors study a shared place with food, stories, materials, and access needs present at the same table.

Working premise

What this project holds.

Art, Architecture & Cooperative Design Initiative is AACDI’s public-facing name. It begins from a three-part doctrine: Universal need. Specific lineage. Local translation. The original name—Anarcho-Anachronistic Community Design Initiative—remains part of the project’s origin story and punk mythology, not its professional headline.

Different visual doorways

More than one way into the idea.

Each image holds a different scale, mood, or practice. Together they keep the project from collapsing into one scene.

Intergenerational community members shaping an open garden pavilion through woven timber, earthen walls, soil patterns, joinery, planting, and shared craft, with a wheelchair user at a workbench
Build living lineages into the roomSoil, structure, craft, celestial light, food growing, and intergenerational work become one inhabitable curriculum.
Watercolor-style design studio where a diverse group, including a wheelchair user, works with a large landscape model, material studies, maps, archives, and an outdoor garden
Bring the inquiry into a design studioModels, material studies, landscape plans, archives, and professional review give community knowledge a rigorous institutional room.

Restoration Commons · AACDI’s role

Make permission, learning, and welcome inhabitable.

AACDI would shape the public-facing room around a host-authorized restoration program—not decide ecological treatments. The work is accessible orientation, shared design, cultural interpretation, and a threshold where people can understand how to enter, contribute, rest, and return.

  1. 01

    Orient without gatekeeping

    Explain the place, its histories, the ecological purpose, who holds authority, what training applies, and which seated, sensory, mapping, craft, or remote roles are available.

  2. 02

    Design the Commons kiosk

    Make the day board, permit path, maps, check-in, multilingual wayfinding, accessibility requests, badges, tool instructions, and help contacts legible without letting the kiosk invent authority.

  3. 03

    Build a dignified threshold

    Co-design shade, water, seating, tool storage, wash-up, repair, teaching, and—only where separately permitted—short-stay infrastructure using natural and place-responsive materials.

  4. 04

    Return the story

    Credit participants, document what changed, preserve local knowledge with consent, invite review, and turn each completed task into better orientation for the next person.

The access-and-labor boundary

AACDI cannot grant land access, ecological approval, or overnight permission. Those remain with the actual landholder, agency, regulator, or authorized host. Its job is to make the human agreement visible, usable, revisable, and hard to quietly exploit.

See the South Davis field studySee the permit-linked kiosk model

Evidence in hand

What exists now.

A named project can orient development without pretending that a complete program, host, cohort, site, or institution already exists.

  • 01A public name, descriptor, origin story, and design doctrine
  • 02A working relationship to Oiko Ways, the Room Model, and Inhabitable Agreements
  • 03An IA 2026 workshop application through the Lantern Test and stewardship cycle
  • 04A bounded pilot proposition with explicit labor, credit, data, and decision-rights requirements

Practice rooms

Four ways to enter the inquiry.

These are working areas for learning, review, collaboration, or a future bounded pilot—not departments with unlimited scope or standing authority.

01

Story and archive

Recover memory, lineage, local accounts, missing records, and the stories that shape what a place believes is possible.

02

Art and symbol

Use images, language, movement, communications, and public interpretation to make relationships legible without demanding a single identity.

03

Craft and built form

Connect architecture, repair, trades, tools, material knowledge, accessibility, maintenance, and hands-on public making.

04

Fair share and emptiness

Articulate how resources, labor, access, and authority circulate while preserving reverent space for rest, difference, memory, and emergence.

Current invitations

Ways to follow, contribute, or go deeper.

  • Join the IA gathering interest circle
  • Offer cultural, historical, architectural, craft, accessibility, or governance review
  • Host a limited-duration design table or field inquiry
  • Contribute a place-based question, archive, skill, material, or teaching practice
Register interest

Claim and care boundary

AACDI does not claim cultural authority it has not earned, reproduce sacred or community-held knowledge without permission, or create shadow governance. Any test is opt-in, limited in duration and scope, host-authorized, and explicit about labor, credit, information, decision rights, access, and review.