Sarah Manning is a co-founder and Strategy Director of Spaceagency and has set the company’s direction in experience design and wayfinding. Sarah leads our strategic planning work and has delivered complex, multi-stakeholder projects for major international companies and cities. She holds a Masters Degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with a BA in International Comparative Studies. Her professional experience comprises a wide range of international commissions which integrate user experience, information design and urbanism.
Sarah began her career in user interface design in the Silicon Valley and then in New York City as Art Director in a 3D media company blending virtual space with interactive formats. There she also worked at the United Nations Headquarters designing travelling exhibitions that promoted the mission of the United Nations. With an aspiration to blend communication design into real environments, she pursued urbanism, joining Space Syntax Ltd, a spin-off enterprise from University College London’s Advanced Architectural Studies, which conducts applied research into the structure of cities and complex spatial systems and their affect on user behaviour, where she held the role of Associate Director. Sarah’s international focus led her to become a founding Trustee of the charity Architecture for Humanity UK, where she jointly established a humanitarian lecture series aimed at publicising architects’ and designers’ efforts to use their ingenuity to promote humanitarian relief and development.
Sarah is a joint author of The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding. Her work has been exhibited and published widely, most recently at the Design Museum, as part of the Woman at Work exhibition, and the Somerset House. Her London Pedestrian Routemap was exhibited at the New London Architecture “Public City” Exhibition, and published in Timeout London and GQ Style magazine’s “Blueprint for London” edition.
In 2017 Sarah was selected as a judge for the D&AD international design awards and became a UK Finalist for HSBC’s Women in Business Forward Ladies award. She has lectured globally as an international keynote speaker at the Australian Institute of Architects National Conference 2018, at XIV Quito Architectural Bienal in Ecuador, in the Politics of Space Symposium at the University of Brighton, the Space Syntax 6th International Symposium in Istanbul, in London Biennale, Design Junction, Clerkenwell Design Week and the RIBA’s People in Space Group events.
Sarah is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture and also enjoys teaching. She has been an examiner at the Royal College of Art, has been unit master in the Master of Urban Design courses at the Bartlett/University College London and at Cardiff University, has taught architecture at University of East London and Istituto Marangoni, and has been invited internationally as a guest lecturer and critic at such universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, Milan Polytechnic, the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association.