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As the largest art and design school in the United Stateswith nearly 17,000 students enrolled at its Savannah and Atlanta campusesthe Savannah College of Art and Design prides itself on offering a course of study for almost every type of creative person. Along with degree programs in animation, film and television, game development, graphic design, and illustration, SCAD tempts students with courses in beauty and fragrance, sneaker design, luxury and brand management, and equestrian studies. There’s a new degree program this school year, in Applied AI, that is attracting a different sort of attention. As I learned directly from faculty, students, and industry veterans, and read on Reddit forums, the idea is enticing to someand prompting others to question the schools priorities and its very reason for existing. Using AI Right The idea behind the Applied AI program at SCAD is to . . . . . . equip students with the knowledge and skills that employers want: SCADs website boasts that within a year of graduation, 99% of students are typically employed, pursuing further education, or both. According to SCAD, the Applied AI program will prepare students for professions including AI product developer, AI design strategist, AI story engineer, autonomous agent designer, and ethical design strategist. SCAD is also offering a minor in Applied AI thats open to students across all majors. This is a researched best guess about a changing employment landscape, says Nye Warburton, chair of interactive design and game development at SCAD, who leads the Applied AI program. Our assumptions are that AI will create new domains in product development, design, story, and ethically focused systems. Our major is designed to develop the skills and practices that we see emerging in those fields. Guided by input from creative and design leaders in industry, the Applied AI curriculum was developed by Warburton in collaboration with SCAD’s curriculum and assessment team, the deans of the school of creative technology and the school of animation and motion, and various professors and department chairs. It has three pillars: story, action, and impact. We already have foundational and general education classes at SCAD, says Warburton, referring to offerings such as drawing and design thinking, math and English. So if you’re a writer or an architect, or whatever, you still need to have those fundamental understandings. The AI story classes, he stresses, are not about that kind of basic storytelling, but aim to help students build more resilience and understanding of their purposewhat they want to use AI foras they move forward. The impact component of the program involves making sure students understand intellectual property, environmental issues, and other broad concerns about the use of AI. The last component of this is an impact test, currently in development, that students will have to pass after their sophomore year. We dont let you go to the higher levelsdesigning AI agents and doing capstone workuntil youve placed out of these civics classes. The action part of the program looks at workflow practices and application-specific ways of using them, says Eric Allen, associate chair of interactive design and game development and an instructor in the Applied AI program. Major game studios, for example, are already using AI models for generating and amalgamating ideas, he says. And, of course, they vibe code, building plugins that can help them in their workflows. SCAD aims to engage faculty from across the school to teach these interdisciplinary classes, focusing on uses of AI that are most relevant to their fields. In addition to current faculty who will teach these cross-disciplinary classes, SCAD is in the process of hiring a dedicated Applied AI faculty. One of our main goals for curriculum development is to embrace design and art workflows and push [them] further with applied AI learnings, Warburton says. It is an opportunity to invent new collaborative interdisciplinary things. And my hope is that thats where the jobs will bein the intersection between these disciplines, even if traditional disciplines become disrupted. Disruption and de-skilling Of course, AI is already disrupting fields like gaming, film and animation, graphic design, and copywriting. In a 2024 State of the Game Industry report from the Game Developers Conference, 84% of developers indicated that they were somewhat or very concerned about the ethics of using generative AI, which has already contributed to large-scale layoffs in the industry. According to an industry tracker, an estimated 14,600 people were laid off from game development positions in 2024, up from 10,500 layoffs in 2023. Generative AI is an automation technology, full stop, says Reid Southen, a concept artist whose credits include movies The Hunger Games, The Woman King, and Matrix Resurrections. While he agrees that there are cases where AI tools can speed up certain tasks and potentially benefit artists, he says, “There’s no world in which it creates jobs. He and other artists are reporting less work and lower payand theyre increasingly asked by clients to fix up concepts originally created with AI. Adding insult to injury, image video-generating models such as Midjourney, Stability AIs Stable Diffusion, and Open AIs Sora are all facing lawsuits over the alleged use of copyrighted imagery in their development. Another concern is that AI will lead to a broad de-skilling. As an artist, you make thousands of micro-decisions while making a piece of art, Southen says. Every brushstroke or click is a choice, and both you and the work evolve throughout that process. With AI, you give it a few large decisions about what you want, and it makes all those micro-decisions for you and fills in all the gaps. Warburton understands the threat to artistry and industry know-how. I think it is an obligation to vehemently defend the expertise that we have. The friction is, How do you use these new tools to augment these skills, as opposed to just prompting your way through it? I’m worried that we’re not going to have a senior level of talent in the future, he says, noting that junior-level designers wont learn how to make creative decisions. Enthusiasm varies For these reasons and more, enthusiasm for the new AI curriculum varies widly among SCAD faculty and students. Many in industrial design, UX, architecture, and interior design are proactively moving forward in AI, Warburton says. They have a clear idea of how they can integrate it into their processes. The business classes are really interested in how we do simulations and predictive models. I thought photography would be way against it, but a lot of the professors said theyve already been disrupted by digital, so theyre kind of ready for [AI]. On the other hand, he says, Im not a very popular human being in certain majorssuch as illustration and sequential art (comic books, graphic novels). What I hear a lot is, I cant make a graphic novel with AI because the publishing industry will never accept it. The schools animation department is ambivalent. The animation professors are really into it, because they see the possibility of the pipeline accelerations like rigging and compositing and different kinds of rendering. However, the students are very against it, Warburton says, noting that students express concerns about the use of artist data in training generative models, and issues with AIs environmental impact. However, I personally believe that automation anxiety is the root. Since the program was announced this fall, four students have declared Applied AI as their major, and 25 have declared it as their minor. (The first official Applied AI class, AI 101featuring exercises in developing a personal story, and a crash course on LLMs and image modelsstarts this winter.) The school expects the number to increase significantly next academic year. A cold day in hell As always, the most honest discussion seems to be happening on Reddit. The general consensus among students here is that the ai major is a joke. and so are the bots studying it, writes Redditor @sunadherstars. I just graduated from the SEQA [sequential art] program like this past quarter and let me tell you: itll be a cold day in hell before they ever push AI, writes @electricaaa. The entire department is extremely against it, no matter how much the administration tries to push it. Still, theres no doubt that for companies hiring creative talent, familiarity with AI is high on their wish list. Ami Frost, who will graduate from SCAD with a BFA in industrial design in December, reports that thats a recent shift. Some friends have actually gotten jobs because they know AI. I think learning how to use AI is definitely going to be a good stepping point in your career, like it or not. Taking a few extra classes to get better at AI makes sense, says a recent SCAD graduate in UX and industrial design, who preferred not to give their name in order to be able to speak more freely. But a degree drastically impacts the trajectory of your life. Would you want to choose something based on the hottest trend? Imagine if [SCAD] had started offering a major in NFTs when those were the next big thing. I think AI is too new to really have had the time for a robust education on how to use it to emerge. Personally, I’d rather wait for a boat to be fully constructed before taking it for a four-year ride down the Nile. SCADs critics have often felt that the school operates more like a business than a traditional academic institution (even though it operates as a nonprofit). For the fiscal year ending June 2024, the school reported revenue in excess of expenses of more than $220 million, and president and founder Paula Wallace received compensation of more than $2.6 million. (Yearly undergrad tuition and fees, minus room and board, is currently $42,665.) But while it may be tempting to write off the Applied AI degree as a slapdash money grab, its worth noting that SCADs rivals are increasingly AI-curious. ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence both offer classes that integrate AI. Last year, Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, launched an AI certificate program similar to SCADs minor. Perhaps todays new generative AI tools will become like once-novel programs such as Adobe and CAD, absorbed seamlessly into the design process. If they take designers jobs, though, or thwart students ability to learn the basics, there may be no one left to use them.
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Below, Paul Leonardi shares five key insights from his new book, Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life. Paul is a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a frequent consultant and speaker to a wide range of companies, such as Google, Microsoft, YouTube, McKinsey, GM, and Fidelity. He is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review. Whats the big idea? We are the first generation in human history to carry the entire worlds information, connections, and distractions in our pockets. Its no wonder that the technology once promised to make life easier now leaves us tired and overwhelmed. Paul Leonardi refers to this as cognitive and emotional weariness, calling it digital exhaustion. But it doesnt have to be this way. With intention, we can turn our devices from sources of drain into tools of connection, empowerment, and creativity. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Paul himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Exhaustion isnt weaknessits physics Maya wakes up at 5:50 a.m. to her phone buzzing. Within seconds, she is scrolling on Instagram. A news alert pops upshe clicks it. Three text messages arriveshe switches to a different app. Her partner tries to talk to her, but she doesnt hear him because now shes checking WhatsApp. By the time Maya gets out of bed, she has made dozens of micro-decisions and context switches. Her brain has already started burning through its limited energy reserves, and she hasnt even had coffee yet. This routine is a growing epidemic. In my research tracking over 12,000 workers across 12 countries for two decades, I found something startling. In 2002, the average digital exhaustion score was 2.6 out of 6. By 2022, it had skyrocketed to 5.5. My nine-year-old daughter looked at the graph and said, It looks like a snake about to strike. She was right. And that snake has struck. Think about a phone battery. When its new, you charge it overnight, and it lasts all day. But after thousands of charge cycles, it drains faster and faster. Eventually, it barely holds power at all. Our brains work the same way. Every notification, message, and screen switch drains our cognitive battery. Take Andi, a product manager I worked with at a software company. She told me, I feel like my brain is a phone battery that just doesnt hold a charge anymore. I used to be sharp all day. Now by 2 p.m., Im staring at my screen, unable to focus on even simple tasks. Andi wasnt weak or lazy. She was experiencing what neuroscientists call cognitive depletion. Every time you switch your attention, blood rushes to your prefrontal cortex. Your brain sounds a two-tone alarm, searches for the right neurons to handle the new task, then activates them. This process, called rule activation, happens in tenths of a second. Each switch burns precious metabolic energy. Every notification, message, and screen switch drains our cognitive battery. Your brain accounts for only 2% of your body weight, but consumes approximately 20% of your daily calories. Most of that energy is devoted to keeping your body running: breathing, heartbeat, and temperature regulation. Only a tiny reserve is left for active thinking. As neurologist Richard Cytowic told me, The brains reserve margins are slim and quickly eaten up by constantly shifting attention. I tracked 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies and found that the average knowledge worker toggles between apps and websites 1,200 times per day. Thats 1,200 energy-draining attention switches. If each switch takes just two seconds, thats 40 minutes a day just transitioning between tools. But the real cost isnt time, its the cumulative exhaustion from all that switching. Since ancient Greece, writers have described exhaustion as the depletion of a finite resource. Today, that resource is attention. Just like muscles grow sore from physical labor, minds weaken when overtaxed by constant switching, scrolling, and interpreting. The problem is that our bodies are great at signaling physical fatiguesore muscles, aching jointsbut our brains rarely wave a red flag. Instead, exhaustion sneaks up on us. We dont realize weve crossed the line until were already depleted. Stop blaming yourself. If you feel exhausted by digital tools, youre not failing. Its the inevitable physics of finite energy colliding with infinite digital demands. 2. Tools multiply faster than our capacity We often assume the solution to digital overload is better tools. If I just had the right app, we think, everything would be easier. But the more tools we adopt, the more fragmented our lives become. Consider HealthCo, a global company I studied. When I asked employees to list their digital tools, I found that they werent just using email anymore. They had Slack for chat, Zoom for meetings, Jira for project management, Salesforce for customers, SharePoint for documents, Teams for cross-department updates, plus dozens of specialized tools. Each promised to make work easier. Together? They created chaos. One employee, Marcus, told me, I spend more time figuring out where to respond than actually responding. Did that question come through email? Was it on Slack? Did someone tag me in Jira? Im constantly hunting for conversations across platforms. My research revealed that the average knowledge worker spends 57 minutes per day switching between applications. They also spend 30 minutes daily deciding which tool to use for each task. Should I message on Slack or email? Should I put this in Notion or Google Docs? These micro-decisions seem trivial, but when youre making them 1,200 times a day, they create what psychologists call decision fatigue. Let me tell you about Shireen, a marketing specialist who listed 36 different digital tools she used daily. Everything from Adobe Illustrator to TikTok to her banking app. After our conversation, she looked at her list and said, Oh God. That exhausts me just looking at it. The average knowledge worker spends 57 minutes per day switching between applications. Shireen decided to try an experiment: she cut her tools in half. She identified tools that were redundant (using both Alexa and Siri), tools she barely used (Evernote for notes when she had Word), and tools that werent essential (three different social media apps for posting the same content). Six months later, her exhaustion score dropped by 40%. She told me, I thought Id miss those tools, but instead I feel liberated. Its like I decluttered my digital life. Technology expands faster than our cognitive capacity to manage it. Were running software from 2024 o hardware (our brains) that hasnt been upgraded in 300,000 years. Exhaustion isnt built from volume alone, but from fragmentation across too many platforms. 3. Interpretation is more draining than information Its not the flood of emails and notifications themselves that exhaust us most. Its what I call inference fatigue, meaning the mental work of constantly interpreting ambiguous digital communication. Take Aaliyah, who runs a nonprofit in Georgia. Her inbox was overwhelming, but what really wore her down was the constant interpretation. She told me, I spend so much mental energy trying to decode messages. Why did my colleague only reply with okare they annoyed? Why hasnt the donor respondeddid I offend them? What does that emoji really mean? Its exhausting trying to read between the lines all day long. Digital communication strips away crucial context: tone of voice, body language, facial expressions. Our brains work overtime to fill in the gaps. This creates what neuroscientists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor call controlled processing, or slow, deliberate, effortful thinking that demands huge amounts of cognitive resources. Researchers examined college students responding to ambiguous Facebook posts. Not only did students feel mentally exhausted trying to figure out if someone was genuinely depressed or just seeking attention, but the emotional toll of arriving at these conclusions left them feeling depleted and dispirited. Think about your own digital life. How often do you reread a text, worrying about its tone? How many times have you analyzed a brief email response, wondering if the sender is upset? These micro-interpretations pile up until were mentally drained. In the analog world, a face-to-face conversation offers dozens of cues that help us interpret quickly and accurately. A slight smile, a furrowed brow, the speed of responseall provide instant context. In the digital world, every interaction becomes a puzzle to solve. These micro-interpretations pile up until were mentally drained. But it gets even more complex. Were not just interpreting others; were also constantly evaluating ourselves through digital mirrors. Take Zoom fatigue. Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford found that seeing ourselves on video calls creates unprecedented self-scrutiny. As he put it, Imagine in the physical workplace, for the entirety of an eight-hour workday, an assistant followed you around with a handheld mirror. Thats essentially what happens on Zoom. One of my students, Xiao, confessed to me, When youre teaching on Zoom, Im constantly managing how I appear. Am I nodding enough to show Im engaged? Can you see Im taking notes? I was so busy thinking about how I looked to you that I missed half of what you were saying. Exhaustion isnt just about too much input. Its about the invisible, constant work of decoding others meanings and managing our own digital presence. 4. Boundaries create energy, not limits We tend to think of boundaries as walls that keep us from being responsive and connected. But my research shows the opposite: boundaries create energy. Consider Vicente, a high school teacher and soccer coach I studied. He made one simple change: he turned off all notifications during soccer practice. No emails, no texts, no pings for two hours each afternoon. At first, I was anxious, Vicente told me. What if I missed something important? But then something magical happened. I was fully present with my players. I could see their technique improving, and have real conversations with them. And when I checked my phone after practice, I had more energy to deal with messages because I wasnt depleted from constant interruptions. Boundaries are like fences around your attention. They dont shrink your world; they protect the space where energy regenerates. In one study I conducted with companies using internal social media platforms like Jive, employees who set specific times to check messages improved their ability to find expertise by 31% and identify key contacts by 88%. Why? Because when they werent constantly interrupted, they could pay attention to patterns in communication and learn who knew what in their organization. But many of us resist boundaries. We worry well miss something critical or appear unresponsive. Jed, an investment banker I interviewed, prided himself on responding to every message within minutes. Im dependable, he told me. People know they can count on me for fast responses. We worry well miss something critical or appear unresponsive. So, I interviewed his colleagues. Most didnt even notice his quick responses. His boss actually wished hed slow down: Sometimes Jed responds too quickly without thinking things through. Id prefer more thoughtful responses, even if they take longer. Jed was exhausting himself to maintain a reputation that didnt exist. His always-on approach scored him a five out of six on the exhaustion scale, while providing no real benefit to his colleagues. Boundaries are about saying yes to energy, focus, and genuine connection. When we protect our attention, we create energy. 5. AI could save us . . . or exhaust us completely Let me present two scenarios based on my current research with ten companies that are implementing AI. AI as liberator. Imagine an AI assistant that truly understands your work patterns. It filters your inbox, showing you only the three decisions that need your input today. It summarizes those lengthy Slack threads into two sentences of relevant information. It drafts routine responses that sound like you, leaving you free to focus on creative, meaningful work. Im seeing glimpses of this at companies like HealthCo, where junior lawyers use AI to review contracts. Tasks that took days now take hours. They use their freed-up time to do higher-level work: strategic thinking, relationship building, creative problem-solving. AI as amplifier of exhaustion. My students recently used ChatGPT to write thank-you notes to a guest speaker. The AI expanded their brief thoughts into lengthy, formulaic essays. The speakers response? If youd sent me all these AI-expanded notes, I wouldve just fed them back into ChatGPT to summarize them. Think about the absurdity: Were using AI to expand our content, forcing recipients to use AI to compress it back down. Its an exhaustion amplification loop. Im already seeing this at scale. One executive told me 70% of internal documents at his company are now AI-generatedlonger, more verbose, but not more valuable. As he put it, Were drowning in synthetic content that no human actually wants to read. The scariest part? AI is getting better at keeping us hooked. In one study, personalized messages crafted by ChatGPT were remarkably effective at persuading people. AI can recognize our emotional states better than many humans, and it never gets tired of talking to us. A company I consulted for developed an AI sales assistant specifically designed to keep customers on the phone longer. As their product chief told me, Or AI figures out the perfect next thing to say to maintain engagement. Its like a conversation that never wants to end. If we design and use AI thoughtfully, it can reduce exhaustion by handling routine tasks and freeing us for meaningful work. But if we let it run wild, it will accelerate our exhaustion to unprecedented levels. AI is either the beginning of the end of digital exhaustionor exhaustions final evolution. The choice is ours. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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In these volatile times, how do we navigate the intersection between values and commerce? Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert and Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya join New York Times reporter David Gelles onstage at the Masters of Scale Summit to reveal their different strategies for dealing with an activist White House, the pressure for what moderator Gelles calls “anticipatory compliance,” and how they grow their businesses while also prioritizing causes like environmental conservation and immigration. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Gelles: Ryan, Patagonia is a very different sort of company. This company has been meddling in politics, sometimes quite loudly, for more than 50 years now. Gellert: Meddling is a strong word. Meddling . . . oh, that’s a gentle word. [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard has been donating to grassroots environmental activist campaigns for more than 50 years. In 2017, Patagonia sued President Trump and his cabinet during the first . . . Gellert: Yeah, that’s meddling. That’s meddling. And you still, even at a moment when most CEOs are afraid to say anything about this administration, you’re still out there raising the alarm almost every single week, it seems. When your business is selling clothes, why do you spend so much time talking about politics and policy? Gellert: Well, first of all, it’s super interesting being on the stage with you, Hamdi, and with you, David. I think you made reference to it. You wrote a book that’s just come out in the last month about our founder and our 52-year history. You and I have gotten to know each other quite well over recent years, and I think there’s a lot that we have spiritually in common as companies. And then I think, to the nature of your question, to each of us, there’s a lot that’s actually quite different in how we navigate that. I think for us to now answer your question, we are focused on protecting the natural world. Period. That’s why we exist. It’s not about making money. It’s not about being the biggest player in outdoor apparel and equipment. It’s about protecting the natural world. And so that’s what we do, and we exist in a world right now, here in America, where the threats are absolutely unprecedented. And I think that what you might describe as speaking out, I just think is telling the [expletive] truth about what’s going on in the world right now. Okay, so the climate’s at risk, pollution and polluters, the regulations are coming off, and conservation, particularly public lands here in America. I mean, it is one goddamn threat after another, every single day. And so what are we speaking up on? Those things that matter. Same things weve spoken up on for 52 years. As the CEO of a company and as an individual, do you ever worry about the fact that this is a moment and an administration that has shown a willingness to be retributive? Gellert: Yeah, of course. And how do you navigate that? Is there any, I mean, the word is anticipatory compliance? Are you holding back at all? I think we have to be very strategic. I think we have to be very considered. I think what we talk a lot about is, where do we have authenticity to offer an opinion on something, and where can we be truly additive? If it’s performative and we’re just offering an opinion to offer an opinion, that’s not a space we’re going to play in right now. I don’t think the times benefit from that. I think where we can be truly authentic is in one or two places. One is we’re a business, and so we can speak from the business sector. And the other is on environmental and climate issues. We’ve got a 52-year history. We work our asses off to minimize our footprint. As you made reference to, we’ve supported grassroots activism for 40 years and counting. And so that’s who we are, what we do, and I think we’ve earned the right to offer opinions on that. You get a sense of the different approaches to really a very similar and consequential set of issues. We’re going to talk about more than politics, I promise, but I do want to come back to this issue of, Hamdi, how you navigate a moment like this, and when you decide to work with Ivanka Trump, even when you decide to work with the White House. It can seem like a no-win situation. You work with someone, you piss one side off. You say something, you piss the other side off. How do you think about engaging in these partnerships where you are trying to find common ground without alienating any of your consumer base? Ulukaya: Yeah, look, what I do and what we do at Chobani is really, we have the known instinct or reflex that we react regardless of what the world thinks and all that kind of stuff. Ivanka actually did not start now. I worked with her in Idaho after President Biden got into the White House, actually. And what we did is, we made boxes of food from the farmers, and we delivered to people in need in communities at that time. And later on, even before the election, she and her partner, they created this organization called Planet Harvest, and she says: “Do you realize that in California, 40% of all the fruits and vegetables are wasted and left in the land because they don’t look good and there’s no buyer?” And I couldn’t believe it. I am aware of these things, but I didn’t even realize. And I went to the land and I saw, and partnered with her and her partners who had studied quite knowledgeably. Absolutely, we’ll do it. Absolutely, we’ll do it. I’ll invest with it, and I’ll lead it and improve the concept. So to me this . . . and when I said we are going to hire refugees during the first, I don’t know how many years ago, we got death threats and boycottsall kinds of stuff like that. The first time I wrote about your company. Ulukaya: You wrote it in The New York Times, and we got death threats. We all have to react as human beigs, who we are. And businesses are a combination of people. You’ve got to do the right thing regardless of what lawyers and communication experts will say. On the advisor council stuff right now. Ulukaya: I want to invite everybody towe have some serious, serious issues that we have to bring everybody to the table to. Look, we really do. I do see some egocentric reaction . . . just anger because of the other person. Okay, they are enormous about the differences. I don’t know. I was invited to the White House because I’m announcing a huge investment in Idaho and another one in Rome in New York, and being part of Invest in America. I don’t have any working relationship with the White House, but my view on immigration and refugees is the same. I have an organization called Tent. I just came from Mexico. I’m meeting all those people who are encouraging people to hire refugees and train refugees. These are timeless truths. People are going to move, and we have to make a system that works for every single person. And we proved it in our factories, in our communities. And today, you will not have farmworkers, or you will not have functioning farms and agriculture, without immigration. Everybody knows that. Everybody.
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