About

Yasmine Abbas is a French architect, researcher, and educator exploring how neo-nomadism influences the practice of design and the experience of place. She is the author of the book "Le Néo-nomadisme: Mobilités, partage, transformations identitaires et urbaines" (FYP, 2011). Her diverse art and design engagements serve as vehicles to interrogate how an increasingly mobile, cosmopolitan, and connected population can meaningfully inhabit a world in flux. Her work has been published in various edited books and journals, and she has co-founded the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) project, a hybrid design and research collaboration that has received multiple awards and been exhibited internationally. Abbas's multicultural background and international work experience across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America have informed her creative approach to research and teaching. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT. Currently, she is an Associate Teaching Professor of Architecture at Penn State, where she directs the Immersive Environments Lab, and has previously held academic positions in Paris, including chair of design management at Paris College of Art and roles at Ecole des Ponts Paris-Tech and Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture.

Research topics

• Computer science
• Geography
• Human–computer interaction
• Cartography
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Translating Christopher Alexander’s Patterns for Immersive Virtual Reality A rule-based approach to behavior testing in VR

  eCAADe proceedings · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Architecture has a profound impact on the behavior, emotions, and well-being of its occupants. Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' provides design solutions to create adaptive humanistic buildings. However, the lack of empirical support for these patterns is one of the reasons that hinder their widespread adoption that can result in the design of positive environments. It is imperative to test these patterns more rigorously. Immersive virtual reality can be used in this effort to simulate various architectural conditions based on recommendations from the patterns that can be tested with diverse groups of people. This paper proposes a method that demonstrates the use of shape grammar formalism to translate patterns presented textually into three dimensional architectural features. An initial/pilot test of this proposed method in a VR scene brought forward strengths and weaknesses in this approach that will aid in the development of future and more rigorous experiments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Occupying Africa: Prototyping a Transformal Makerspace Network

  Architectural Design · 2021-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Experimenting with the varied contexts of work, living, education and making/producing throughout Africa, DK Osseo‐Asare and Yasmine Abbas – both members of the Architecture and Engineering Design Faculty at Pennsylvania State University – have co‐founded and developed the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP). They outline the background and functioning of this enabling system that encourages participants to use the low‐tech resources around them to build their skills and change their environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Architecture and its Double, The Expanded Medium of Architecture and Spatial Aeffect

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The digital has expanded the medium of architecture, bringing with it a focus on architectural surfaces. This paper presents a theoretical discussion centered on spatial æffect or how architecture operates as an atmospheric machine. The argument is that architecture’s double, atmospheric and meaningful archi- tecture, architecture that affords mental transport across time and space, emerges when instead of focusing on the backdrop to the action or on surfaces, architects consider dimensionality and play with the experiential assemblage of the many material and immaterial elements that constitute space. Engaging in the production of architecture’s double is not only necessary for creativity and spatial diversity, but also for enchantment, which can drive attachment to places and help create and sustain a sense of belonging.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Crafting Space

  2020-11-09

  book-chapterSenior author

  Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform 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, a transatlantic architecture and integrated design studio based in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana. Mapping the economic ties, interrelationships, and material flows of stakeholders in and around the Agbogbloshie scrapyard shows that unmaking is part of a continuous process integrated with making and remaking. Spacecrafting serves to capture the imagination, reframing “Afronautics,” navigating the space-time of Africa’s speculative futures, as something achievable and realizable, compared to narratives of Afrofuturism as aesthetic fiction. Spacecrafting entails being doubly active: simultaneously the activator and the action.

  PublisherDOI

• Architecture as Landscape

  SHS Web of Conferences · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study constitutes the latest reflection on pedagogical research and experimental pedagogical projects involving the representation, design, and computation of ambiances. Led by the author at various architecture schools in France, Japan, and the United States, these creative explorations involving drawings and models offer ways to realize, feel, and fabricate architecture. The projects described were conducted in 2018 in courses offered by the Department of Architecture, Stuckeman School, College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. They show that architectural productions are not static objects, but instead render a dynamic landscape itself nested within a changing milieu. Through these projects, by looking closely at the parameters of spatial effects, students engaged in processes of design taking movement into account in meaningful ways.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• XXIII. FLUID SPACES, ENCHANTED FORESTS

  2019-09-23

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  her research explores mobility, digital culture, and augmented place-making, with current focus on fabricating atmospheres, generative mapping, cartography, and the computational design of ambiance. She received an SMArchS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Computing Atmospheres

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Cartography of Ambiance

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2016-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Part of topic : Traces, notations and representations of ambiances

  Publisher

• Investigating 3E-materials at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana

  2015-06-01 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  The product life cycles of electrical appliances and electronic devices impact society and the environment, given the hazardous portion present in their materials flow. Scrapping as an industry serves to decommission end-of-life (EOL) equipment, linking materials processing and recovery activities with recycling, but must be controlled against adverse environmental and human health safety factors. This work tracks an on-going effort—the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP)—to use participatory design methods to upgrade capabilities of the scrap, recycling and maker community located at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana through co-creation of technology. The authors explain AMP's aim to reconceptualize Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE or e-waste) as Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE or 3E): not as waste, but as inter-manipulable assemblages of 3E-materials. AMP seeks to employ a hands-on Makers and Development approach (M&D) as a collaborative process to drive interclass innovation by co-designing and fabricating a makerspace, or open community workshop and lab, and networking e-waste and scrap recyclers starting at Agbogbloshie with students and recent graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics or STEAM fields. The investigation at Agbogbloshie over a period of 24 months suggests opportunities for utilizing participatory design to leverage waste management and 3E-materials processing across informal sector recycling ecosystems as inputs for popular prototyping, i.e. peer-to-peer digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing.

  PublisherDOI

• Two Generations Together

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2013-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  International audience

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Watkin

  Université de Nîmes

  6 shared

• Jaillon Lara

  City University of Hong Kong

  3 shared

• DK Osseo-Asare

  2 shared

• Cati Vaucelle

  1 shared

• Keerthana Govindarazan

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Heather Ligler

  Florida Atlantic University

  1 shared

• DK Osseo‐Asare

  1 shared

• José Duarte

  Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

  1 shared

Labs

• Immersive Environments LabPI

Education

• DDes, Graduate School of Design

  Harvard University

  2006

• SMarchS, Architecture

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2001

Awards & honors

• Penn State Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design (C-PAD) In…
• Penn State University College of Arts and Architecture Facul…
• Penn State University Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design…
• Buckminster Fuller Institute Catalyst Program SEED Social Ec…
• Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant (2016)