Materials engineering has greatly contributed to improving the performance of soft active materials, but these improvements have seldom met the compelling needs of science and engineering applications. Here, we demonstrate, for the first time, a new approach to the design of soft active materials, which embraces the complexity of multiphysics phenomena across electrostatics and electrochemistry. Through principled experiments and physically-based models we investigate the integration of electrostatic actuation in ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMCs).