Katie Salen - Early Career

Early Career

2001–2003

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, 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; 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!

2004–2006

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.