Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Work
Recent News
Books, Articles, Journals
CHAPTERS
Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices
2024 | ISBN: 978-3-8376-7142-1
DialecTikTok: The Dynamic Semiotics of Amateur Visual Trends on TikTok
By Sarah Edmands Martin
pg. 55 – 64
Synopsis
What does it take to create innovative tech-savvy designs that are usable, appealing, and good for society? The contributions to this volume introduce contemporary research on the digitization and »datafication« of products, exploring topics like user experience, artificial intelligence, and virtual environments in design. Coming from varied backgrounds in product design, interaction design, service design, game design, architecture, and graphic design, they emphasize that digital transformation is not just a technical process, but also a social and learning process that fundamentally changes the way we understand information.
JOURNALSCounterText
2024 | Print ISSN: 2056-4406
Literature As, With, and For Artificial Intelligence: Speculative Designs and Provocations for Alien Readers
By Sarah Edmands Martin, Patrick Jagoda
pg. 238 – 247
Synopsis
CounterText focuses on contemporary literary and post-literary cultures, publishing articles, interviews and creative work centered on the study of literature and its 21st-century extensions. It poses questions such as: Is literature what it used to be? Are the broader resonances of the literary being overtaken in the drifts towards image cultures, digital spaces, globalisation and technoscientific advances? Or might the literary simply be elsewhere?
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGSMoDE: Unframed
2023
Between Time:
By Sarah Edmands Martin
Stop-Motion Techniques for Lost Stories
pg. 151 – 155
Synopsis
Designing motion is designing an illusion. This illusion is visible only in the connective implication between two stationary frames, two fixed images: a frame from before and a frame yet coming. From Muybridge to Reiniger, Méliès to Ptushki, Gilliam to Laika, the history of stop-motion is a history of visualizing wonder. Early cinema embraced the trick of stop-motion after its discovery by Méliès——when his camera accidentally jammed and the arrested motion created a marvel on his developed film. This paper will argue that it is in this in-between that contemporary stop-motion can point to the untold, the peripheral, and the marginal.
Design as Common Good
2021
Ongoing Matters: Government Document Design in the Public’s Interest
By Sarah Edmands Martin, Anne H. Berry, Andre Mūrnieks
pg. 652 – 674
Synopsis
In the face of numerous global crises, including the rise of authoritarianism and targeted misinformation media campaigns, promoting information literacy, cultivating civic participation, and providing access to information is essential to the common good of communities all over the world. The repercussions of complacency and distrust of scientific expertise are being felt in real-time, even as the United States struggles to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper, consequently, aims to capture design’s role as a communication conduit for the public good. Based on a current project titled Ongoing Matter: Democracy, Design, and the Mueller Report, this paper identifies strategies for increasing public engagement with and access to factually dense documents, such as government reports and records. Though focused specifically on the Mueller Report, Ongoing Matter is a case study for similar scenarios wherein information dissemination is crucial to the public interest.
MoDE: Interplay
2019
Between Time:
By Sarah Edmands Martin
Stop-Motion Techniques for Lost Stories
pg. 151 – 155
Courses Taught
JO
Ethics in Design and Communication: Critical Perspectives
2024 | ISBN: 978-1-3500-7700-3
Swiping Left on Empathy: Gamification and Commodification of the (Inter)face
By Sarah Edmands Martin
pg. 28 – 39
Who Owns the Smart City? Towards an Ethical Framework for Civic AI
By Sarah Edmands Martin, Michael A. Madaio
pg. 61 – 72
Synopsis
This timely collection brings together critical, analytic, historical, and practical studies to address what ethics means in the practice of design. Designers face the same challenges as everyone else in the complex conditions of contemporary cultural life-choices about consumption, waste, exploitation, ecological damage, and political problems built into the supply chains on which the global systems of inequity currently balance precariously. But designers face the additional dilemma that their paid work is often entangled with promoting the same systems such critical approaches seek to redress: how to reconcile this contradiction, among others, in seeking to chart an ethical course of action while still functioning effectively in the world.
Reviews
“We are no longer operating in a world where we simply encounter objects and artifacts designed to act upon us. We are increasingly working on platforms and living in environments that are themselves designed to influence our thinking and behaviors. This is a wide-ranging survey of the deeper implications of design choices in the twenty-first century, and an urgent call to bring ethics back into the process, before they are rendered out of reach.”
Douglas Rushkoff
author of Team Human
Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics
Queens College, City University of New York, USA
author of Team Human
Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics
Queens College, City University of New York, USA
"A useful contribution to an important topic, and I think it will readily find its readership."
Tom Fisher
Professor of Art and Design
Nottingham Trent University, UK
"An important and vital contribution to design education and research... I commend the editors and authors on this achievement."
Laurene Vaughan
Professor of Design
RMIT University, Australia
Courses Taught
BOOKS
Forthcoming...
2026