Katie Salen is a game designer, animator, and design educator. She is a professor in the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media.[1][2] She has taught at Parsons The New School for Design [3] the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Salen is one of the co-authors of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, and the co-editor of the The Game Design Reader, a Rules of Play Anthology. She is the former Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design, as well as the former Director of the Center for Transformative Media, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, which promotes game design as a non-traditional educational tool. In 2009, she helped launch Quest to Learn (Q2L), a new public school in Manhattan, New York City, for which she is the Executive Director of Design.[4]
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Salen graduated from the University of Texas in 1990 with a B.A. in Fine Arts.[5] She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.[5] At RISD she studied semiotics with Tom Ockerse, who focuses on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. She also worked with designers Jan van Toorn of the Netherlands, Michael Rock, and Sharon Poggenpohl. She has an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bank Street College of Education.
In 2001, Salen started to work at Gamelab, where she still serves as a member of the advisory board as of 2010. In 2002, Creative Time in New York hired Salen to develop the curriculum and workshops for the Blur Conference. From 2002-2003, she was a writer and animator for music videos for the band Zero7,[6] which had extended play on MYV, MTV and VH1. Also from 2002–2003, Salen was asked to design the Big Urban Game (BUG), a citywide multiplayer game which was to be played by the residents of Minneapolis and St.Paul in Minnesota as part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center engaged Salen to co-curate with Graham Leggatt, the director of the society, "Game Engine", an evening of programming for the New York Video Festival in 2003. In that same year, Salen started writing for RES Magazine, which focuses on film, design, culture, art and music;[7] She continued as a contributor until 2006.
Also in 2003, Salen worked as part of a research team to create and design an interactive, animated storytelling experience that was to be distributed through Xbox Live!
In 2004, the Hewlett Foundation took on Salen as the co-director for the Games to Learn Symposium. She was also a consultant for the Digital Kids initiative through the MacArthur Foundation, and served as a game designer for a large motion capture game called Squidball that was developed with the Media Research Lab at New York University. In 2004, the Comtech Group (COGO) hired Salen as a consultant for a mobile phone game, and for their online world. The MSN division of Microsoft engaged Salen as a consultant for the redesign of the website in 2004. ATTAP, a group devoted to new web technologies, used Salen as an interactive game designer for their new tools. Salen was also involved in 2005 as a game design consultant with The Rapunzel Project to teach girls computer code. The Buckminster Fuller Institute partnered with the Game Culture & Technology Lab at the University of California, Irvine to create a spaceship earth game, which Salen also worked on in 2005.
From 2004-2006, Mememe Productions in Melbourne, Australia, had Salen design a came for a children’s television show and for their online community site, while from 2005-2006 she worked on the ISEA2006 Symposium in San Jose, California. This was presented by CADRE Interactive City residency. From 2003 until the present, Salen has been the Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design.
Salen worked on this project alongside Nancy Nowacek and Marina Zurkow in August 2006.[8] The project transformed an ice cream truck into a mobile karaoke unit which roamed the streets of San Jose, California, inviting people towards it with free popsicles. Everyone and anyone was invited to participate in a live karaoke session which would be recorded to be played over loudspeakers later. The songs that were available to sing included "Hey Ya!" by Outkast, "These Boots are Made for Walking" by Nancy Sinatra, and "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." by Aretha Franklin.
Along with Frank Lantz and Nick Fortungo, Salen was asked to help design this large-scale urban game for part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration. All residents were encouraged to participate in the race, the goal of which was to move a 25-foot high inflatable game piece through a route throughout the Twin Cities, hitting several "checkpoints." Salen created this game to engage a large community with culture and with each other, in an effort to make the residents more aware of urban design.[9][10]
Salen worked as an animator for this critically acclaimed feature film, directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores topics such as free will, determinism, dreams and the nature of reality.[11]
Salen is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, an organization that embraces game design as a learning tool for the 21st century. Institute of Play aims to use games as a non-traditional tool in areas such as academia, the government, science, technology and the arts. Some of the goals that the Institute of Play works toward include providing a space to experiment and exchange one's ideas through different channels and creating collaboration among students, educators and professionals. They also aim to connect the so-called digital natives – those born into a tech-savvy culture – to the digital immigrants – those who must learn to adapt to the tech-savvy culture in their adult years. Some projects the Institute of Play has produced include Quest to Learn,[12] Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab, Summer Teaching Institute, and Gamestar Mechanic Strategy Guide.[13]
Salen is the Executive Director of Design of Quest to Learn,[14] a newly developed public school in Manhattan, New York City created out of a collaboration between Institute of Play and the New York City Department of Education, with backing from the MacArthur Foundation and support from New Visions for Public Schools. The school began in the 2009-2010 school year with one sixth grade class, and will add a new sixth grade every year until 2015, when it will be a fully functioning combined middle and high school encompassing grades 6-12. It is located in the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Q2L is based on a collaborative systems thinking approach, with game design being the central organizing focus. The school uses digital media and game design as the primary means for accomplishing educational goals, with video games and other technologies at the center of all classes and learning experiences. Not only are games played, but game design itself is used as a teaching tool as well.[14][15]