—Yasmine Abbas & DK Osseo-Asare. (2022). Paysage électronique mouvant [Moving Electronic Landscapes]. In Allard, L., Nova, N. & Monnin, A. (Eds.), Ecologies du smartphone. France: Le Bord de l’eau. ISBN 978-2-35687-791-8.
—DK Osseo-Asare & Yasmine Abbas. (2021). “Occupying Africa: Prototyping a Transformal Makerspace Network”, in Dongwoo Yim and Rafael Luna (PRAUD) (Eds.), Production Urbanism: The Meta-Industrial City, Architectural Design. London: Wiley. 8 pages.
“Soft know-how and hard knowledge dichotomies parallel Yona Friedman’s call to integrate ‘prenticeable disciplines’ (arts and crafts, architecture and planning) whose practitioners operate by subjective ‘tricks of the trade’, with objective ‘teachable disciplines’ that are rule-based and ‘scientific’. This view offers that design best supports democratic functioning within society when professionals and laypersons engage with their environment and each other, in tandem. Bi-channel information architectures (‘twofold instruction’) enable novice and expert to coconstruct intercommunication using ‘the same rules, but on different levels’, providing both open access and the option to contribute to a common repertoire of material procedures for transforming spatiality.”
AD 91, pp. 64
—DK Osseo-Asare & Yasmine Abbas. (2021). “&spacecraft: Building an Afronautics Program”, in Richard Rottenburg, Oulimata Gueye, Julien McHardy, Philipp Ziegler (ZKM | Center for Arts and Media) (Eds.), Digital Imaginaries: African Positions Beyond Binaries. Karlsruhe: Kerber Verlag. 22 pages. Book publication (German & English editions) based on the intercontinental exhibition series: Digital Imaginaries: Africas in Production.
“But the question remains: Can we scaffold radically open pathways to digital inclusion, realizing cooperative futures that are nonexploitative and nonaligned, quickly enough to supersede the imminent AI-enabled clouding of African minds? Can we craft spaces that empower youth to realize their full potential as proactive producers of technology, instead of its passive consumers, to collectively challenge the reinscription of (neo)colonial power structures across digital domains?”
&spacecraft, pp. 190-211.
—DK Osseo-Asare. (2021). Scaling Microtecture: From the Primitive Hut to Vernacular Technology. In Meuser, P. & Dalbai, A., (Eds.), Theorizing Architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Perspectives, Questions, and Concepts. Berlin: DOM Publishers. ISBN 978-3-86922-400-8.
—DK Osseo-Asare. (2021). “What is Fufuzela? Futuring the Pan-African Museum”, in Report of the Presidential Committee on Ghana’s Museums and Natural Heritage. Nana Oforiatta Ayim, ed. ANO Institute of Arts and Culture, on behalf of the Government of Ghana. January 4, 2021. 5 pp.
“What word or phrase in your language speaks to what a building may become when reformulated as a body made up of a skeleton, skin and possibly a few essential organs—a body, or bounded system—that may be living now, in the past, or in the future? Given that all matter exists as part of a continuous process cycle circulating life and death and being, how do you talk or listen to a building? How do you dialogue, or dance, with architecture that is alive (…) ?”
Chapter 9, “Architecture” by DK Osseo-Asare, pp. 46-50.
Download the full report: https://www.ghanaheritagefuture.com/report
—DK Osseo-Asare & Yasmine Abbas. (2020). “Crafting Spaces” in Farhana Ferdous & Bryan Bell, eds., All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture: Toward the Future of Social Change. New York: Routledge. 9 pp.
“Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) is a youth-driven community-based project to empower grassroots makers to make more and better together. It was initiated and incubated in 2012 by Panurban, a Paris-based strategic design consultancy, and Low Design Office (LOWDO), a transatlantic architecture and integrated design studio based in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana. AMP began as an experimental demonstration of “stellate design,” a participatory design method developed by the authors for inducing inclusive innovation that links stellation and constellation interoperatively using a polyvalent parametric design process and a “makers and development” (M&D) approach. 1 Starting with a road map for an open technology platform, utilizing the theory of change methodology, 2 we first created a “spacecraft” concept before developing it iteratively over five years with members of the AMP Makers Collective and participants in the #AMPqamp (“AMP Camp”) series of maker workshops. Conceived as process more than product, AMP spacecraft emerged through co-design with more than 1,500 youth from West Africa, Europe, and the United States—half students and recent graduates in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) fields and half informal sector or grassroots makers—as a twofold form of empowerment. On the one hand, it leveraged architecture to enable resource-poor and vulnerable communities to improve their standard and quality of life and work, and on the other, it expanded the scope and territory of architecture, broadly considered a participatory mode of design and production. We consider this to be an interclass approach to amplifying opportunity: generating the space for alternative future making through the coupling of disciplinary knowledge and latent professional capacity with the practical know-how of grassroots makers and indigenous technology systems to build a STEAM-powered engine for Sankofa innovation (Figure 1). 3 […]
Chapter 3.7: Ferdous & Bell, 2020.

—DK Osseo-Asare. (2020). “Lowness” in FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture “Radical Noir”, (2), Graduate School of Architecture [University of Johannesburg] and the City College of New York. Presentation included in issue launch, Spitzer School of Architecture [via Zoom], after journal editors Lesley Lokko (‘Facing Forward: After the Storm’) and Caroline Wanjiku Kihato (‘Taking Risks in Storytelling’). September 4, 2020.
Supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, FOLIO is Africa’s newest, peer-reviewed journal of architecture exploring issues, ideas, built projects, criticism and speculative writing on a wide range of topics concerning architecture, urbanism and creative practice both at ‘home’ and abroad. In this second volume, thirty-eight contributors showcase some of the most innovative and critical writing, projects and reflections coming ‘out of Africa’ and the Diaspora today.
—DK Osseo-Asare, in conversation with Ryan Bollom. (2020). Texas Architect. September/October 2020 feature, in print and online.
Technology today enables new, potentially more inclusive models of design-building-making-operating such as open-source architecture and open design. The defining characteristic of these models is that data and structured design information (design content, or intellectual property) resides in a “commons.” This content forms libraries that other users can access, use, and contribute to the iterative design process flow. Technology platforms enable this information to be shared in ways that in the past would have required added cost via human labor.
—DK Osseo-Asare. (2020). “Wild Innovation”, presentation for the AIR Centre “Networking Fridays” series. July 17, 2020.
—DK Osseo-Asare. (2020). “Kiosk Culture”, in Bernd Upmeyer (Ed.), MONU #32, “Affordable Urbanism”, (32). Rotterdam. [Browse the issue on Youtube.]