New York City October 10-16, 2011 www.mobilityshifts.

org

Designers for Learning

Saturday, October 15, 11:15 a.m. Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 66 Fifth Avenue
Designers of all kinds are key players in the game of change that so typifies the opening decades of the 21st century. Called on to imagine, build, guide, demystify, explain, provoke, enable and inspire designers deal daily in the currency of transformationof places, practices, and perspectives. For this designer, play has become a key strategy in developing a design practice that is agile enough to entertain a constant need for transformative thinking but substantive enough to throw its strategic weight around in the quest to reimagine learning. This talk will delve into the power of game design and play to challenge expectations around what learning might look like for todays young people. Katie Salen: An Associate Professor in Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design, Salen is also co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as the Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press. Interested in games as both aesthetic and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as a point of departure. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Katie has worked on a range of projects for Microsoft, Gamelab, the Hewlett Foundation, the Design Institute, mememe Productions, Salty Features, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and others. She is a former member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, urban games. Playground has been recognized as helping to pioneer a genre of games know as Big Games-large-scale urban games that engage players in activity both in physical and online space and recently explored another new genre of games-Slow Games-in the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis magazine. Slow Games take 25 years to play.

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