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By Edem Dotse
Spring 2025

DK Osseo-Asare does not fit in a box. Described by  as a “Ghanaian-American polymath who collaborates with communities to craft material assemblies tuned for ecosocial resilience”, his projects traverse the disciplines of architecture, design, engineering and art with an equity-focused approach to innovation. A registered civil engineer with Ghana’s Institution of Engineering, he currently serves as Associate Professor of Architecture and Engineering Design at Penn State University and director of the Humanitarian Materials Lab. He received an MArch and AB in Engineering Design degrees from Harvard University.

He is co-founding Principal of Low Design Office (LowDO) based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana. He was architect of Ghana’s second pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, redeployed as the installation Enviromolecular at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale: The Laboratory of the Future. Osseo-Asare co-initiated the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) project in Ghana, which is a pan-African participatory design initiative to build alternative futures.

I’d like to begin with a borrowed quote from the Low Design Office website. “High art borrows from the low, and transformative innovation happens when the creator overcomes limited means to provide meaning in their work”. Can you speak about your personal journey to this philosophy?

I came to lowness in part through a series of observations I made about how architectural value was appraised while I was in graduate school. In that context, projects were judged on the basis of a certain strand of intellectual rigour and engagement with the historical traditions of the discipline but also, on scale and budget. Which was interesting but to me, a limiting approach to the notion of the architectural. Because if you can produce a shelter or some piece of environmental equipment which can offer some utility to a human being or to a community, but you can do it with very minimal means, or do it in a way that does not degrade the environment- isn’t that also interesting?

The other part of it was my upbringing. I was raised in the Mennonite church in Central Pennsylvania. A principle of the Mennonite tradition is that it can be meaningful to worship God through service, by helping those in need. And before I went to the Graduate School of Design, I lived in India for a year, then Ghana for a year. I went from working with guys that were day laborers, who, if they didn’t work a day, they wouldn’t eat and their families wouldn’t eat, to being trained to design multi-million dollar projects for wealthy individuals and corporations. The difference was night and day. And I didn't see my constituency in that. Because for me, because of my background, it's actually not difficult to just try and work for very wealthy people. It's not a very complex challenge, because if you have an unlimited budget, then it's just a game of geometry and mathematics, and visual, tactile and spatial dimensions, aesthetics. Intellectually, it's more challenging to have the harder problem of working with limited resources. But it's also about, what's your philosophical stance towards humanity? In what ways can your own practice be in service of humanity as opposed to being in service for a very circumscribed set of individuals, such as a client or an investor?

While students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a few of us (like-minded makers) got involved with a still-active group in Lowell, Massachusetts called the United Teen Equality Center. UTEC is a platform for teen empowerment, back then also a gang-free zone and space for immigrant teens living in a diverse post-industrial New England town. We ended up working with them on a design-build renovation project. They acquired an old church, and we converted the sanctuary into a basketball court and put up chain link fences. A handful of us students who were all connected through the Lowell project, took a class with Professor Margaret Crawford, where we co-created the idea of Low Design Office; she is the one who introduced us to the academic lineage of the notion of high art borrowing from the low. One of her books is also called Everyday Urbanism, which speaks to how urbanism doesn't have to be only billion dollar mega projects by the city and corporate investors. Everyday people and their communities and the ways that they live within the city and transform it — that’s also urbanism. Effectively, during this class, we (myself, LowDO co-founder Ryan Bollom in collaboration with our friend Ben Wakelin) decided to formally start a design firm. Those conversations helped us prototype our core principles, which is how we ended up calling ourselves Low Design Office. Lowness was incubated formally in this context, making connections from Lowell to low.

Your work seems to find you moving between different kinds of spaces- academia, professional design spaces and informal economies. How do you navigate working with communities that might see you as an outsider? And beyond that, how do you manage the power dynamics so that it’s truly collaborative and not just one-sided?

I would say there's two things. One is building trust, and the other is not being extractive. The Western model is to build trust, and then use that trust to be extractive, which is, I would say, dishonest and unjust. It's much more preferable to build trust, and then use it in a mutualistic sense, so that it benefits the community, but it can also benefit you. 

Speaking broadly to the context of West Africa, when you show up to a community consistently, when people see your face, when you get to know their names, when you greet them properly, you build familiarity. That's the first threshold to reaching trust. You build trust when people see benefits. That benefit doesn't always have to be financial. Often it’s when people start to see you as an asset to their community, when they see that you’re doing good work, or at least trying hard. That's how you build trust- by helping them or just connecting with them.

Since we began working in Agblogbloshie, we’ve contributed to people's funerals or people traveling back to their hometowns, or when a family member was not well, and so on. It doesn't mean that we emptied all of our resources into that. It's a token. It's showing that you see what they're going through and that you recognize their struggles. It's a slippery slope, because of course, you can become entangled. So you have to manage it. 

I'm usually trying to do participatory projects that are about community building. So we ask people what their problems are. And then we say, “we don't know how, but we want to try to figure out what's going on here, and to see how we can contribute and bring some form of upliftment”. If that's your entry point, people will often at least be willing to listen. They won't necessarily always engage. But I would say it's about being honest, showing up and participating in an ongoing community's activities over a period of time. 

The idea of non-extraction is where a lot of my writing is right now. In terms of my own publications and work, it essentially has to do with the idea of openness. I teach a class at Penn State on design for open innovation. “Open” doesn't necessarily mean “freely accessible to all”, or “autonomously existing on its own”. There's always some type of an ecosystem that supports it. But openness is the only way to avoid extraction, because extraction comes about when you take something and say “now, this is mine”. And what's most egregious about it is that typically, the thing that is captured belongs to a community, and then some individual or private entity then claims ownership, and that's actually in reality categorically false.  

When community focused work gains a level of currency in the public sphere, that visibility can be both an asset and a constraint. On one hand, bigger platforms create more resources that allow the work to continue. But on the other, they can demand a kind of posturing that feels at odds with the ethos of the work itself. How do you stay rooted in your values while navigating the expectations that come with institutional recognition? How do you balance the need for visibility with the need to maintain the integrity of what you're building?

There's a certain kind of absurdity when you are working within a North American institution, but the locus of your artistic or professional practice is in West Africa. I asked a similar question in an interview with (architect) Lesley Lokko about how to manage moving between worlds. She said to me, quite matter of factly, “our job is to be a translator”. You're not always creating something new. The idea that everything you're doing is original and this idea of knowledge production in the academy is somewhat misleading. People will go to a community to research some group of people, write up what that community does and then call it “knowledge production”. But they didn't produce the knowledge. They just now came to understand something that already existed. All of the people living there were fully aware of these things. Sure, they might have used some certain words or frames or angles, but I think the term can be sometimes duplicitous. 

I’ve been thinking about kiosk culture in Ghana as a platform for technology innovation since my time in graduate school.The aim of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platfom is to build a locally craftable technology system and then disperse it in society. The long term vision is that this kind of apparati is made and crafted by people locally in their own workshops around on their own, and they can then build on top of it. They can leverage it as a kind of micro infrastructure to build full scale 3D printers and local technology outposts as the next phase of what we see as kiosks right now. So we're still on track. It's a very slow project. That's why we set up a workshop in the timber market, knowing from our research that the government would eventually demolish the Agbogbloshie scrapyard. Now, people have CNC plasma cutters and people are on computers where ten years ago, there were no computers. We're in a way, the front lines of this kiosk culture. I say all of that because again, the way we work through these different spaces is that we have to always center that project, and the project always ultimately is at the grassroots. I’m part of many communities. I’m a professor of architecture and engineering. And I'm a co-founding principal of an architecture office that does work with amazing clients. Then there’s the art world. I see it all as a sort of planetary system. But my sun, I would say, is an ecosystem of makers between Accra, Tema, and a little bit into the mountains of Ghana. The heartbeat always has to be about, how do you equip your core constituency? And if you adopt a philosophy of lowness, it has to be a grassroots community somewhere that either you belong to or that welcomes you in.

I once asked a question to Dr. Michael Ben-Eli, who does these really complicated  sustainability projects with all these moving parts. I asked him, “How do you even explain such a complex project to all these different people? And he said, “I don’t. People don't always need to understand everything. They just need to understand what they need to understand in context.” It was a massive lightbulb moment. I realized I'd come to learn that a little bit. But I had never recognized it, because you know, all the parts of your project exist in your head because you're in the center. And so sometimes you feel like everyone has to be where you are. But most people don't really understand all the different dimensions of the work. And that’s okay. You don’t need to beat them over the head with it. 

That gets me thinking about the process of time and the notion of longevity as  it relates to a sense of perspective of one’s work. Because if the end goal of a project is to reach a specific platform, or to win an award, then it’s almost like the project is shaped by that endpoint. But if it’s about something beyond those things, then the approach has to be different, right?

Exactly. And this is why I brought up Dr. Ben-Eli. I often tell my students that “time is space”. When I work, I'm doing things now, that are for twenty years from now. And I'm still processing things that are from twenty years ago. Most of the time, when I’m moving through these different spaces, people are entirely perplexed by what I do. It doesn't make sense to them, because they're looking at the now. And if you're always working from the vantage point of now, even though it's important to be present in the now, your perspective is limited. But if you think about time in terms of space, then it frees you up to work differently.