Why Savannah College of Art & Design Is the Future: Betting on Creativity in the Age of AI
When algorithms consume the ordinary, extraordinary human creativity becomes the ultimate currency. SCAD isn't just preparing for this future, it invented it.
“I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.” - John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society (1989)
What kind of education will actually matter when machines can do most of what we currently consider work? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
The AI revolution isn’t some hypothetical future. It’s here, already reshaping every industry from finance to healthcare, transportation to education. And while most universities scramble to adapt, one institution has been preparing for this reality for decades.
When John Paul Rowan, Chief Marketing Officer at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), invited us to visit following a Zoom a few months ago, I was intrigued. What kind of education actually matters when AI can out-analyze, out-code, and out-produce? I arrived in Savannah on a Sunday afternoon, with my partner Krista joining me later that evening.
That night, I had dinner with John Paul at The Grey, a restaurant housed in a restored Greyhound bus terminal from 1938—another example of Savannah’s blend of heritage and innovation.
The next morning, we jumped right in. Our first stop was Professor Maximo’s Private Label Production Development class—a perfect introduction to SCAD’s blend of creativity and commercial fluency.
Later that day, we met Jesús Rojas Ache, SCAD’s Vice President of Academic Services and Industry Partnerships, for lunch at Gryphon Tea Room. A 23-year SCAD veteran, Jesús brings both institutional knowledge and personal passion—he loves watches, designs yachts in his spare time, and lives and breathes the intersection of creativity and precision. Housed in a former apothecary and staffed by SCAD students, Gryphon was the perfect setting to talk about how the university connects academic excellence with industry readiness. Jesús spoke with clarity and conviction about SCAD’s mission—not just preparing students for the future, but actively shaping it.
Savannah is a masterclass in design and preservation—brick-paved streets, Spanish moss, and storefronts with distinctive local character. A city with personality, not polish. That seamless blend of preservation and reinvention isn’t just Savannah’s charm—it’s a metaphor for SCAD’s educational philosophy.
The Creative Imperative
Comforting fiction: your job is safe.
Hard truth: if AI can see a pattern, it can replace you.
Any task built on pattern recognition, data processing, or predictable decision trees is ripe for automation. That includes large swaths of accounting, law, medicine, programming—fields once thought untouchable.
Yet amid all this disruption, one category of work remains stubbornly human: creative problem-solving.
Machines can remix. They can optimize. They can churn out endless variations.
What they can’t do is originate.
They didn’t invent Pixar. Or the iPhone. Or “Just Do It.” Those weren’t just technical outputs, they were acts of imagination, taste, and emotional insight.
The market already knows this. Creative professionals earn up to 45% more than technical peers with similar experience. The World Economic Forum predicts that while 85 million jobs may be displaced by automation by 2025, 97 million new ones will emerge—with creative thinking named as the #1 skill required across industries.
The SCAD Difference
SCAD’s origin story says it all. In 1978, Paula Wallace, a public school teacher, mortgaged her home to buy an abandoned armory in Savannah. She wasn’t chasing academic prestige or research funding. She was building something purpose-built for the future: a school that turns creative talent into professional success.
The result is unlike traditional art schools that train students for gallery walls, or liberal arts programs that cultivate ideas without practical skills. SCAD doesn’t teach art for art’s sake. It teaches art for market’s sake. Not a pipeline to museums. A pipeline to Google, Disney, BMW, Delta.
Creativity with commercial teeth.
Our most impactful moment came in Professor Maximo’s Private Label Production Development class. Her career bridges fine art and fashion—trained at RISD, she helped shape Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters before launching her own sustainable brand, ANNAK. Her students weren’t there to dabble. They were building brands, designing products, and thinking through supply chains.
Krista and I shared our own entrepreneurial story: POPSUGAR, ShopStyle, early investments in Everlane, Olive & June, Afterpay, and our work today at Sugar Capital with brands like Lucky Energy, Grüns, and Starface.
The Q&A session revealed students with unusual commercial awareness. Their questions cut straight to the fundamentals of business viability and market strategy. They weren't interested in theory but in practical application. When I introduced the distinction between entrepreneurs and "wantrepreneurs", doers versus talkers, heads nodded in recognition. They understood intuitively that execution trumps ideation.
What struck me most was their commercial mindset alongside their creative capabilities. These weren't art students dabbling in commerce; they were being trained as the market-makers of tomorrow.
Building for the AI Economy
While elite universities tweak their syllabi and slap AI buzzwords onto outdated majors, SCAD has quietly been building a new model from scratch. Not to win awards, but to launch careers. Not to impress donors, but to equip doers. Most traditional institutions are playing defense, adding data science courses to liberal arts programs or entrepreneurship concentrations to business degrees. These are incremental adjustments to an educational model designed for the industrial era, like adding cup holders to horse carriages just as automobiles arrive on the horizon.
SCAD has taken a fundamentally different approach. Instead of retrofitting traditional education for the AI age, it built something purpose-designed for a future where creativity is the primary economic currency. Traditional universities still separate art from technology, maintaining disciplinary silos that barely communicate. SCAD integrates them seamlessly. Students in Digital Media collaborate routinely with fashion designers, illustrators work with UX designers, and film directors partner with sound designers.
Where most design programs focus on mastering existing tools, SCAD teaches students to adapt to tools that don't yet exist. The curriculum emphasizes foundational visual principles, design thinking methodologies, and problem-solving frameworks that transcend any particular software or technology.
SCAD Success in Action
The real proof of SCAD's model lies in its graduates. Consider Becki Tower, who joined Pixar after earning both B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees from SCAD. She ascended to Animation Supervisor on Cars 3 and contributed to Oscar-winning films like Up and Toy Story 3. Her career trajectory isn't a fluke, it's a product of both talent and deliberate preparation.
"You don't graduate with a résumé. You graduate with receipts."
When I spoke with faculty about Tower's success, they mentioned how her SCAD experience had prepared her not just to animate, but to lead creative teams and make high-stakes decisions about projects with nine-figure budgets. This is the kind of outcome that happens when education integrates technical skills, creative development, and professional training in equal measure.
SCAD’s Hollywood-Grade Playground
The next morning, we toured The Backlot, SCAD’s 11-acre film studio and the beating heart of its growing Savannah Film Studios complex. Forget classroom theory—this is hands-on, Hollywood-grade production infrastructure.
Originally built in 2014 inside a converted meatpacking plant, the studio has since expanded into a fully immersive professional environment. The newest phase includes a 17,000-square-foot production facility with modern costume design labs, LED volume stages for virtual production, a hair and makeup studio, and a massive makers space for woodcutting, welding, painting, and prop creation.
We walked through sewing labs and design classrooms where students were drafting patterns, tailoring costumes, and collaborating with set builders across departments. Paula Wallace, SCAD’s president, described it perfectly: “This expansion serves as a testament to SCAD’s commitment to cultivating industry-ready talent.” And it shows. This wasn’t a school pretending to be a studio. It was a studio that happened to be in a school.
Phase three of the expansion—already underway—will add even more: a police station, a single-family home, a town square, and two more soundstages. When complete in 2026, the full buildout will make the Savannah Film Studios one of the most robust academic production environments in the world.
You don’t walk through the Backlot and think “student project.” You think “film in production.”
A Long Position on Human Creativity
That first evening, after arriving in Savannah, I walked through Forsyth Park as the sun began to set. The air had that distinct Southern softness—the kind that slows your pace without asking. I had dinner with John Paul at The Grey, a restaurant housed in a restored Greyhound bus terminal from 1938—another example of Savannah’s blend of heritage and innovation.
What stays with me most about SCAD isn't any single facility or program, but how the university embodies the creative ethos it teaches. Student artwork isn't relegated to end-of-semester shows; it's celebrated everywhere. This is an institution that doesn't just talk about valuing creativity; it manifests that value in every decision, from curriculum design to campus aesthetics.
As AI reshapes the employment landscape, I think of my own children and the world they'll inherit. What they'll need most are not just technical skills that AI can eventually replicate, but the distinctly human capabilities for original thought, visual intelligence, and emotional connection. They'll need to be people who can imagine what doesn't yet exist. Who can start with nothing and find form, color, story, meaning.
Weird. Wonderful. Wildly useful. This is what a long bet on human creativity looks like.
Pixar didn't hire Becki Tower because she could use Maya. They hired her because she could see.
And in an AI-saturated world, I'd take a SCAD grad over a prompt engineer any day.
Special thanks to Jack McCahill, Assistant Director of Friends of SCAD, our guide, storyteller, and resident thespian. His passion for SCAD was infectious, his knowledge deep, and his enthusiasm unforgettable.