Colleen Macklin was recently featured in NEA Arts, the quarterly magazine of the National Endowment for the Arts. Colleen is one of our esteemed faculty in the Design and Technology program at Parsons, and she also heads PETlab, a design lab that develops games around social issues.

The article focuses on the intersection of games, the arts, and the creative process. It also highlights the games Macklin has designed in recent years, many of which prove the utility of game play in encouraging creative thinking around social issues. From the article, “Macklin maintains that games present an unlimited opportunity for 21st-century learning and innovation across disciplines. They offer a collaborative, practical way to arrive at extraordinary solutions by reframing how we tackle seemingly unsolveable and overwhelming situations.”

Says Macklin, “Games are unique objects or forms that let us bring together science, technology, engineering, math, and art into one form. Not just learning how to make games, but [the act of] thinking about creativity is going to be crucial to our future.… A lot of the big problems we have today are systemic. So I think using games as a creative and fun way to think through systemic issues is definitely going to be a strategy we have to cultivate in the 21st century. Games help us evolve as human beings; they help us gain new intelligences.”

Check out the full article here. Congrats to Colleen!