Sarah Edmands Martin

Sarah Edmands Martin is a designer and scholar whose work unfolds at the intersections of visual communication design, digital storytelling, and media aesthetics. Across these areas, she adopts a speculative design approach defined by asking “what if?” to reimagine how design, as a form of sociocultural inquiry, might call attention to the entanglement of aesthetics and power in our digital milieu. Expanding design’s role beyond the commercially driven motivations of the twentieth century, her work defamiliarizes our world through the practice of material tinkering, which carries a capacity to disturb the status quo that is bound to the affordance of design’s everydayness. She applies a broad range of analog processes, such as typesetting, illustration, resin casting, book design, packaging, installation, and curation alongside digital processes like programming, animation, projection mapping, augmented reality, 3D modeling, and multilinear storytelling to materialize how social fictions of power proliferate—and how they might be shaped otherwise.

Before joining The University of Chicago, she was faculty at the University of Notre Dame (2022–2025) and the head of the Graphic Design program at Indiana University (2018–2022). During a 2024 U.S. Fulbright in Norway, she used speculative methods to materialize how human memory, digital computation, and temporalities that exceed human experience can be evoked through fables, riddles, and archives. She is the author of two chapters in Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2020) and a chapter in Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices (transcript Press 2024) both of which examine how the socio-cultural impact of print, screen-based, motion, and augmented media might better serve collective futures. Her current book project, Beautiful Bureaucracy: A Design Brief for Civic Life (MIT Press, 2026), asks: why can’t bureaucracy be beautiful? The book tracks how design and bureaucracy are historically and contemporarily co-productive (despite being treated as opposites), how critical design might better be used to increase public engagement with dense government materials, and how speculative design complicates contemporary political modes.

Her design work has been exhibited at galleries and museums such as the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Media City Gallery (UK), Smithsonian Museum of American History (Washington, DC), and others. Her designs have been recognized and published by PRINT, Graphis, the Paris Design Awards, London International Creative, and the Creative Communication Awards. Finally, as collaboration is idiomatic to the design discipline, an important part of her practice is partnering with experts in STEM and media fields. Her portfolio of clients includes Citibank, AMC’s The Walking Dead, the Snite Museum of Art, Herman Miller, IonQ, Whirlpool, and Cook Medical, among others.

Martin, Sarah Edmands, and Berry, Anne H. Beautiful Bureaucracy: A Design Brief for Civic Life.

Cambridge: MIT Press (forthcoming).

Martin, Sarah Edmands and Jagoda, Patrick. “Literature As, With, and For Artificial Intelligence: 

Speculative Designs and Provocations for Alien Readers.” CounterText, edited by 

Mario Aquilina. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

Martin, Sarah Edmands. “DialecTikTok: The Dynamic Semiotics of Amateur Visual Trends on 

 TikTok.” In Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices, edited by 

 Laura S. Scherling, 55–65. Columbia: Transcript Academic Press, 2024.

Martin, Sarah Edmands, Berry, Anne H., and Mữrnieks, Andre. “Ongoing Matters: Government 

Document Design in the Public's Interest.” In Design as Common Good: Framing Design through Pluralism and Social Values, edited by Massimo Botta, Sabine Junginger, 652–674. Manno: University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, 2021.

Martin, Sarah Edmands. “Activist Activated: Efficacies of AR Political Poster Design.” In Design 

Culture(s). Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, Vol № 2, edited by Loredana 

Di Lucchio, Lorenzo Imbesi, Angela Giambattista, Viktor Malakucz, 117–130. Aalto: Cumulus, 2021.

Martin, Sarah Edmands. “Swiping Left on Empathy: Commodification and Gamification of the 

(Inter)face.” In Ethics in Design and Communication: Critical Perspectives, edited by 

Laura S. Scherling, Andrew DeRosa, 28–40. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.

MAAD 26210 / ARTV 16210 Media Arts And Design Practice (Fall 2025)