Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making

Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making DK Osseo-Asare

I’ll start by saying it’s great to be back in London. I’m excited to be here and to be part of a really interesting series of conversations on the overlaps and commonalities in the various languages of design. It’s been 10 years since I was in London, when I spoke at the Royal Institute of British Architects as part of the Stephen Lawrence lecture series.

Today, I want to talk about some of the work we’ve been doing in that 10-year period, some of the challenges that we’ve been facing and how we’re trying to conceptualise ways to make sense of those challenges.

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I am the co-Founder, along with Ryan Bollom of an architecture and design studio called Low Design Studio (LowDO). We are a transatlantic design studio based in both Ghana and Texas, and that’s very much a part of our practice - to think about what it means to practise globally and to deal with some of the challenges working in the African context. Recently, the Architectural Review did a profile on LowDO, in which they sourced a quote from almost 12 years

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ABSTRACT: DK Osseo-Asare, Co-Founder of the architecture and design studio Low Design Office (LOWDO) and Associate Professor of Architecture and Engineering Design at Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, argues that Ghana’s Agbogbloshie is not a waste dump but a cumulation of micro-factories involved in recycling, repair and production. Using spatial mapping, design-thinking and architectural construction techniques, he has codeveloped the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), a set of small-scale, low-cost, open-source workspaces and toolkits to facilitate on-site fabrications.

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

ago in which we stated that ‘the only way that we can be radical today is to build’ – we stand by this today. We’re very much interested in doing actual things in spaces, and so for us research and design are ways of looking at how to change reality. A lot of our design work is sort of a ‘hack’ to come up with the resources, to be able to bring about the changes that we want to see. When you’re engaged in a design project which is relatively conventional, particularly an architectural project, there are certain conventions of how to manage the project which make sense and result in for example, a functioning building. But in less formal contexts, the process can be far messier, particularly when you have many people involved and it’s not so clear what the outcome is. We operate in both of these contexts.

Today, I want to talk about design, about innovation and about a concept we’ve been using called ‘stellation’, which is a way of thinking about inclusive innovation. I’ll also touch on a project I am developing with Yasmine Abbas around ‘Spacecraft’, and the concept of ‘sankofa’. But before I do that, I want to first introduce a concept which we began as a research project several years on Ghana’s ‘kiosk culture’.

When you think about Africa, which is today urbanising at the fastest rate of any continent in urban history, you’re confronted with the reality that the production of the city is the destruction of nature.

This is relevant when there’s an enormous growth of cities, of populations, of infrastructure at a regional level across the Continent. I live in Tema in Ghana, which is a new city that was built from scratch for 250,000 people in the 1950s and 60s. Tema was built as a city of industry for factories.

When you move around the city, as in many African contexts, you see that so much of commerce and activity actually happens at the small scale, on the edges, in the in between spaces. These small-scale business models are carried out in mobile or semi-legal kiosks and containers. If you look at these temporary structures as a kind of micro business territory, you identify that there’s commerce happening in those spaces which can be innovative - maybe a barber’s shop which also repairs computers or a furniture fabricator that also sells mobile phone credit. You also find that much of the fabrication which could or should be happening in the larger factories is in fact happening in these micro workshops on the sides of roads. We began to talk about ‘kiosk culture’ and what this means in terms of the production of the city. afridesignx - 2 -

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Less than 1% of the structures built in Africa are actually designed by architects. The majority of buildings are being built by people who are not from the world of large projects with large budgets. A lot of the innovation in building in Ghana is happening in the so-called informal sector at the grassroots. Inspired by this informal, bottom-up innovation, we began to look at ways that we as architects, could engage with informal micro-architectures. To do this, LOWDO began researching new building materials such as bamboo. We ran workshops where architecture students from Ashesi University were challenged with building a $400 dollar building in two weeks. We built a travelling kiosk museum for the artist and curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, which is currently moving around Ghana.

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

Shortly after this, I worked on the urban design of a new town called Anam in Nigeria, intended for a population of about 30-35,000 people. The brief was to build an entirely new town from scratch with an existing community, which has a very rich heritage and ways of thinking about not only their culture but also the land itself. Mapping this digitally, involved many hundreds of people from the community in a participatory design process over multiple years. The aim was to include the community not only in the decision-making around the town, but also in the building the infrastructure of the town. This involved training people to make bricks, training people in construction, building ships and dredgers to collect sand for construction – taken as a whole, this was a very complex project with many moving parts. We were interested in a range of scales of architecture, from houses that would cost less than $1000 to much larger homes for people who have more resources. This is a project which eventually featured at the Clinton Global Initiative for several years and is now under construction.

I’m not really going to go so much into the design strategies behind this project, but what’s relevant about it is that going through these processes, we realised that many people couldn’t understand the process that we were using to integrate many different perspectives and opinions in these complex urban scale design projects. We also were confronted with the fact that the kinds of people who would bring in a billion dollars and were willing to invest a billion dollars in for example this project in Nigeria, were not interested in building for everyone. They wanted to build luxury high rise condos and gated communities. So, given this context, how do you ensure that you design and build for inclusive innovation?

If you look at innovation theory and diffusion, innovation radiates. That is, if you have something new you cannot keep it trapped and secret – it will spread. At the same time, if you want to generate innovation, it is key to bring together different kinds of people together that offer different perspectives. If you want to rethink an architectural problem, don’t put a bunch of architects in a room – invite a poet, a sculptor, a mathematician, a school teacher, a bus driver – people with radically different perspectives or disciplinary views. Through critical discussion and conversation, they will help you to ‘rethink’ the problem. Essentially, that’s a process of stellation. On one level stellation is about

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At this time, I began working with Yasmine Abbas, a French architect who runs Pan Urban, an urban design strategic consultancy out of Paris. We began developing a concept that we called ‘stellation’.

Stellate means star-like, and in geometry it refers to extending the edges of a polygon or the faces of a polyhedron until they intersect, essentially forming a star-like shape. We translated this concept into our design-thinking to mean that when you look at any design problem you have to extend the lines of investigation until they intersect to form new perspectives. You then have to integrate these multiple perspectives to rethink what that problem means anew. A stellate neuron in neuroscience connects different parts of the brain. If you ever think really hard or you work really hard and then your brain hurts, in a way it hurts because you’re literally rewiring your brain. What’s interesting is that you can actually hack your brain to do this.

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

pulling outwards to create these other perspectives, stellation is then looking back at the problem from these different perspectives. And for us stellate innovation or stellate design is really about being able to move back and forth between these as rapidly as possible and as much as possible.

As a tool for this, we developed what we call the innovation star. Essentially it starts with defining not the problem, but defining a road map. We use a theory of change method to think about an action plan, not just to define or frame the problem. This means we get out of the office to interact with people in their environment and to find out how they use things. We take all of this data and remap it, which for us to means to create an ordered field of information that can then be used to code design.

In this way, we design with other people. We also design things as a code themselves, so not as a static designed object, but something which is inherently parametric, dynamic and can be changed relatively easily. This process is not sequential with prototyping following research, it’s all done simultaneously in the same way that you’re trying to hold many points of view at the same time, you’re also trying to run many processes at the same time.

Around 2012, we started looking at how could we build momentum around the ‘maker movement’ in Ghana. There’s a very active BarCamp1 community in Ghana, and we organised a day-long conference in Accra with MIT’s Anna Waldman-Brown. At the end of this conversation everyone was really excited and almost unanimously said ‘Let’s do something at Agbogbloshie’. Agbogbloshie has been described by well-renowned media outlets from the New York Times to the Guardian as the world’s largest ewaste dump. It is actually not the world’s largest, but the idea is perpetuated by the sort of images which circulate around the internet, showing harrowing images of young men in an extreme environment burning cables and wires to collect copper.

BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused around technology and the web.

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We strategized about this and ultimately came up with a plan of action meant to be implemented over many years. It starts with education, tooling, design and enterprise tracks and moves from activation through training, research and development. We spent a lot of time trying to access the Agbogbloshie community in order to understand what the place means to people and how it works. One of the first things that we realised was that the images we see online offer a very superficial understanding of the place. It’s a vast space filled with an enormous recycling, reuse and repurposing industry in which hackers are collecting plastic waste from around the city and repairing discarded objects or using the parts to build new objects. Metal waste from Tema steelworks is used to make ovens, stoves and coal pots in small-scale workshops. A variety of things are being produced out of materials harvested from the city’s waste and scrap - craftsmen and makers are making not only parts and commercial products,

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

but also tools. For example, welding machines made from recycled copper and carbon steel are used by roadside welders all across the country.

We interviewed about 700 people at Agbogbloshie, that is approximately 10% of people working there.

From this, we were able to recognise that making is a spectrum, which goes from unmaking and remaking to making anew. We spatially mapped the work areas to understand where these different activities were happening - where the workshops were located, where disassembly takes place, where scrap is stored. When Agbogbloshie is talked about as a dump, it overlooks the fact that it is in fact a scrap yard where materials are being reused and repurposed – and a manufacturing base. We worked with community members who used phones to map their own spaces. We took thousands of photographs as an archaeology of the present, to document what was happening where. We collected data about the waste stream and modelled these flows all the way from the import of products, their reuse, their recycling and ultimately their export.

We set up our own makerspace in the vicinity. For many years, we focused on simply making all kinds of things. For us, the angle was to get a lot of young people together and have fun making stuff, while engaging with the space and community. We worked with students from Ghana, but also students from France, from Russia, from the United States, from Senegal and from Togo. About 2000 young people have joined us so far, doing many different sorts of experiments through design. We encouraged students to recognise that this scrapyard is a resource and that these expired end-of-life objects are actually raw material for creative production. The maker space installed in the scrapyard was really the home base for activities that got students out of their classroom environment and into spaces where they might not normally go, to co-create with people from other communities.

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The first structure was developed through a prototyping process. It involved building tooling, jigs, rigs, templates and fixtures that enabled people working in Agbogbloshie to make the prefabricated steel truss elements within their work spaces. They re-used steel from the scrapyard and were ultimately required to make these with 1mm precision. It takes about two hours for people to put up a module or to take it down. You can deploy these maker spaces or ‘spacecraft’ wherever you need to be, without having to use a crane for heavy-lifting. The toolkits went through many iterations in order to rethink

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After some time, we began to reframe the project to think about how we might help grassroots makers to gather the resources and tools that they need to make what they want to make, to learn by doing with others, to produce better quality items and more of them, to expand their trade and ultimately to expand or amplify their maker potential. We called this process ‘Spacecraft’. For us, it includes a toolkit which can be customised depending on what it is that you want to make; a kiosk which serves as a micro-architecture to support your maker community and which can be plugged into pre-existing spaces; and an app for trading ideas, helping people understand the hazards of certain materials, and helping different communities to work together.

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

and understand how people were making things – and how some of these processes could be improved and retooled. It is important to understand that these young men working in these kinds of informal grassroots spaces, are learning largely through apprenticeship. They learn in a heuristic way, by doing, by making actual things, which is radically different from how the students that go to university learn.

The aim is to create a sort of inter-coordinated standardised set of parts for this world of kiosk culture that could upgrade people’s ways of making and doing. Part of this is the structural frame which also allows for solar-powered electricity generation, water collection and water filtration; a prefab floor structure; and a hydroponic wall system which we’re now developing to use as a vertical garden to grow food. Another part is the toolboxes, the work benches and a ceiling-mounted CNC robot, which we’re now beginning to work on. This is why we talked about the process as space ‘craft’ and the container as a spacecraft. We are borrowing from the architectural approach of actual spacecraft that are built in a modular way as self-contained environments.

We just finished launching the second spacecraft in Dakar for the Biennale 2018. Young men in Dakar assembled, disassembled and reassembled the spacecraft, which moved to different venues during the Biennale. It housed a deployable fab lab (fabrication laboratory), which was set up on the sidewalks, where people were able to see 3D printing and interact with a variety of different forms of making.

In conclusion, our project is called Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform, or AMP. For us, it ties back to the term ‘sankofa’ which is an Adinkra concept in Ghana meaning to reach into the past in order to gain knowledge for the future. We thought it was important to connect the concepts of sankofa with contemporary ideas of innovation. This allows young people who are working in informal spaces, rather than within a formal educational context, to better practice their tremendous know-how, skills and ingenuity - and to connect them with other young people who are going through science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics fields in universities, who have tremendous technical knowledge but limited practical know-how.

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We see this as an amplifier for developing an innovation engine where makers understand challenges within their local community, and use these to produce solutions. This is as opposed to feeling like innovation is something which has to be imported from outside. We’d like to think about the distribution of these grassroots manufacturing industrial innovation spaces radiating across geopolitical boundaries, as a fleet of spacecraft for the building the future.

Osseo-Asare, DK., 2018, May, 18. Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP): The Future of Making. A paper in the proceedings of the 5th Faradising Conference ‘KpaKpaKpa: Design Concepts from the African Continent’, London, U.K.

AfriDesignX is a Leverhulme-funded network that brings together designers, technological innovators, curators and material culture scholars from five different cities – Dakar (Senegal), Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya), Cape Town (South Africa) and London (UK) – to investigate new design typologies and visual strategies emerging from African megacities.

The AfriDesignX network is co-ordinated by curator Cher Potter and supported by London College of Fashion/University of the Arts and the V&A Museum, London. afridesignx - 7 -

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For more information visit: www.afridesignx.com