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After OcEAnic //
“ Built Environments Lab”





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A Living Essay on Reshaping Practice:
Applied Culture in Design


After Oceanic operates where grassroots relationship, applied theory, and spatial practice meet—advancing justice-oriented, regenerative futures by treating the built environment as evidence: a material record of governance, ecology, culture, and care. Architectural analysis, strategic cartography, material inquiry, and creative speculation move together to make complexity legible without reducing it, supporting Native-led stewardship and long-horizon wellbeing across Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond.

The work is grounded through four practice commitments:

1)    Promoting the wellbeing of built environments
2)    A practice that forms with—and in—place
3)    Advancing form and aesthetics with sustenance
4)    Demonstrating Radical Transformations in Design

Project Index  >>



1)

Promoting the wellbeing of built environments


An artist-driven spatial and civic practice, After Oceanic advances justice-oriented, regenerative futures by translating complex conditions into clear, actionable knowledge. Architecture, land use, and infrastructure are as physical as they are political—records of governance, ecology, culture, and power.
Built work, architectural analysis, strategic cartography, and creative speculation move together so that person and place are understood in relation, not in fragments. Cultural advancement is treated as method: spatial intelligence becomes forms, frameworks, and representations that communities and institutions can carry forward.

Projects in Practice


HuiMAU Ahupua‘a Restoration Project
ʻUkoʻa–Loko Ea Masterplan
Consuelo Foundation Mapping Study






2)

A practice that forms with - and in - place


After Oceanic works where architecture and landscape meet networks, perception, and cartography—making relationships visible between land, ocean, and sky; ecology and economy; infrastructure and culture; history and future risk. Material, information, energy, and time are approached as interdependent systems that humans design and redesign. Led by Hawai‘i-born and Hawai‘i-based artist and spatial practitioner Sean Connelly, After Oceanic is intentionally non-static: there is no fixed studio team. Each project convenes the collaborators the work requires—cultural practitioners, community leadership, scholars, designers, and technical experts—often embedded within partner organizations. This embedded, nimble structure is both method and model: collective care practiced as professional work—accountable to protocol, lived knowledge, and on-the-ground realities.

Projects in Practice


Kaumaui Learning Laboratory
ĀINAVIS Mapping Project






3)

Advancing form and aesthetics with sustenance


ʻĀina requires continual regeneration. After Oceanic understands form and aesthetic as outcomes of sustenance—how land, ocean, and sky, in relationship with community, generate not only function and resilience, but cultural beauty and meaning. The built environment is approached as a living entity that reflects the intellect and wellbeing of its place and inhabitants—human and more-than-human—across ancestors and future generations. Settler colonial land regimes and militarization have disrupted relationships between place and sustenance in Hawai‘i and across the Pacific, producing ecological harm and racial injustice and placing Native wellbeing—and the protective factors of cultural practice—under constant pressure. After Oceanic supports a paradigm shift: treating ʻāina as an interconnected, holographic system of sustenance—and designing accordingly, so that aesthetics are not surface treatment but a measure of relationship, responsibility, and care.

Three crucial interlocking areas of focus include:


︎︎︎Recovering Places of Sustenance

Restoring Indigenous fishponds, loʻi kalo, and other physical sites that have been neglected, erased, or degraded.


︎︎︎Regenerating Native Building and Material Practices

Supporting Native craft, material technique, and cultural protocol in the design and care of built environments, from buildings to infrastructure, from stream to watersheds.

︎︎︎Protecting Cultural Transformation with Place-making and Place-keeping

Advocating for and safeguarding spaces reclaimed for ceremony, observation, learning, and self-determination amid market and industrial pressure.

Projects in Practice


‘Ukoʻa–Loko Ea Building Concepts  
Design Innovation + Material Advancement






4)

Demonstrating Radical Transformations in Design


After Oceanic advances a grassroots model of spatial practice—artist-driven, place-based, and accountable to ʻāina. Each project becomes a setting where cultural responsibility, spatial evidence, and design imagination operate together. The work does not aim to simplify complexity or impose solutions, but to hold conditions long enough for clarity, care, and new forms of action to emerge.

The registers below describe recurring ways this practice takes shape. They are not departments, nor a closed list of offerings. They name how After Oceanic works with people and places—how knowledge is gathered, how form is shaped, and how futures are made discussable.


︎︎︎ʻĀina Stewardship Design

Architecture and planning are approached as long-term acts of care. Built form is understood as inseparable from land tenure, water systems, governance, and cultural continuity. Design asks how space can support sustenance—food, housing, learning, and ceremony—across generations, rather than treating buildings or sites as isolated objects.

︎︎︎Spatial Evidence and Cartography

Many forces shaping Hawai‘i’s built environments are cumulative, spatial, and difficult to see. Mapping and analysis are used to surface hidden relationships—between history and infrastructure, policy and ecology—so communities and institutions can speak from a shared spatial reality grounded in evidence, not abstraction.

︎︎︎Material Inquiry and Prototyping

Making is treated as a way of thinking. Physical models, fabricated elements, and spatial prototypes bring ideas into shared space, allowing people to see, question, and revise together. Materials become a medium for exploring relationship—between body and landscape, tradition and innovation, imagination and constraint.

︎︎︎Learning and Institutional Transformation

Responsibility is a network that extends beyond a single site or organization. Spatial practice becomes pedagogy, strategy, and public scholarship—building capacity within organizations and communities to steward place over time. Design, education, and advocacy are held together as mutually reinforcing paths toward durable transformation.

Projects in Practice


HuiMAU
ʻUkoʻa–Loko Ea
Kaumaui Learning Laboratory
Consuelo Foundation
Healthcare Association of Hawai‘i
ʻĀINAVIS
Loko Ea Journal of History
Design Innovation + Material Advancement
LEGO Ahupua‘a
ʻĀina Holodeck
Hawai‘i Futures
Hawai‘i Nonlinear







Sean Connelly

Email: info@afteroceanic.com
Social: @afteroceanic

Honolulu Worldwide
P.O. Box 15105
Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96830

© 2026