About Me

Hi, my name is Todd Cowden, or “Mr. T” as my students like to call me.

I’m a designer, educator, songwriter, author, lifelong maker of things, and someone who has never been particularly good at staying in one creative lane.

These days, I teach grades 9–12 at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee. My classes include Photography, Advanced Photography, Multimedia Design, Game Design, and a course called Problem Solving & Collaborating with AI. I run the school yearbook and the Lausanne Design Agency, a student-powered creative agency where students get the opportunity to work on real projects for real clients.

The exact list of classes tends to change from year to year. That part really hasn’t changed much over the course of my teaching career.

But honestly, the label on the class has never mattered that much.

Under the hood, I teach creativity.

Not simply creativity in the “make something artistic” sense. I’m talking about creativity as a way of thinking. Problem-solving. Experimentation. Curiosity. Looking at something everyone else accepts as normal and asking, “Why does it have to work that way?”

I want students to be able to look beyond the barriers they once saw and make the impossible possible.

That has been the thread running through pretty much everything I’ve done.

Before the Classroom

Teaching wasn’t my first career.

Before becoming an educator, I spent more than 25 years working professionally in design, advertising, interactive media, web development and game design.

Along the way, I served as Creative Director for a multi-billion-dollar worldwide music company, built a website for illusionist David Copperfield, worked on websites for Dragon Ball Z, created online games for companies including Lucasfilm and Universal Pictures, developed mobile games for National Geographic, and helped gamify Pepsi’s online university program.

It was a strange and wonderful collection of projects.

And looking back, the projects I found most interesting usually had one thing in common:

Somebody was trying to do something that hadn’t quite been done before.

That suited me just fine.

In many ways, my entire career has been about seeing things differently, solving unusual problems, and figuring out how to make ideas actually work.

Eventually, I realized those same skills belonged in a classroom.

So more than a decade ago, I became a teacher.

Apparently I liked it, because I’m still here.

Lausanne Collegiate School

Today I teach at Lausanne Collegiate School, an independent PK–12 school in Memphis with an international student body and the International Baccalaureate program woven throughout its curriculum.

Lausanne has been ranked by Niche as the #1 K–12 school in Tennessee, public or private, for multiple consecutive years. That sounds impressive because, well, it is.

But what matters most to me is what that environment allows us to do.

I get to teach in a place where experimentation, creativity, technology, design thinking and student agency aren’t things I have to sneak into the curriculum when nobody is looking.

They’re part of the work.

My students design things. Photograph things. Build games. Work with clients. Explore emerging technology. Collaborate with artificial intelligence. Solve problems that don’t necessarily have one correct answer.

Sometimes things work beautifully.

Sometimes they absolutely do not.

Both are useful.

One of my current experiments is a classroom system called Lynx Command, an interactive starship simulation I’ve been developing with the help of AI. Students operate different stations aboard a fictional spacecraft, respond to unfolding events, communicate with one another, negotiate, solve problems and occasionally try very hard not to get their ship blown up.

Because apparently normal classroom group work wasn’t complicated enough.

But projects like Lynx Command represent something I’ve become increasingly interested in: what happens when teachers stop thinking of technology simply as something they use and start thinking about things they can now build.

Humans, AI and Whatever Comes Next

Artificial intelligence has become a significant part of my creative and educational work.

Not because I think AI is going to magically solve education.

And not because I think humans should hand creativity over to machines and go take a nap.

I’m interested in something much more complicated, and much more useful:

What happens when humans and AI create together?

For most of my career, an idea could easily hit a technical wall.

I might know what I wanted to make but not know how to program it, animate it, illustrate it, prototype it, or build the system required to make it work. Maybe I could learn. Maybe I could hire someone. Maybe the idea simply stayed an idea.

That barrier is changing.

Today I can collaborate with AI to write software, develop interactive experiences, explore visual concepts, create music, troubleshoot problems, generate prototypes and attempt projects I might never have considered practical before.

That doesn’t eliminate the need for human creativity.

To me, it makes human creativity considerably more interesting.

AI can help me build something.

It still needs someone to decide what is worth building and why.

That distinction matters.

When I’m Not Teaching

When I’m not at school, there’s a pretty good chance I’m still creating something.

Exactly what I’m creating is considerably harder to predict.

I write songs and music. I play piano, guitar and bass. I’ve written books, including a science-fiction novel called Deep Blue. I've taught classes in VR to students all around the world. I’ve worked in digital illustration, photography, 3D modeling and 3D printing. I design things, build things, experiment with technology and occasionally disappear down creative rabbit holes that seemed perfectly reasonable when I entered them.

I’ve created everything from songs and stories to games and tiny 3D-printed objects that absolutely did not need to exist until I decided they did.

There may also be a little gaming mixed in there somewhere.

As a basic rule, though, it’s a lot of creating stuff.

That part hasn’t changed much either.

Why The Creative Sight?

I originally created this site because I wanted a place to explore creativity, design, education and the strange process of turning ideas into things.

That mission has expanded over the years, but it hasn’t really changed.

I believe creativity is one of the most important abilities we can develop.

And when I say “creativity,” I’m not talking exclusively about being an artist, designer, musician or writer.

Creativity is the ability to see alternatives.

To question assumptions.

To recognize possibilities.

To look at the resources sitting in front of you and ask:

Okay...what can I do with this?

We need more MacGyvers in the world.

People who don’t simply complain that something doesn’t work.

People who take it apart, figure out why, build another version and see what happens.

Education needs those people.

So does pretty much everything else.

This site is where I explore those ideas: creativity, education, design, artificial intelligence, emerging technology, classroom experiments, projects that worked, projects that didn’t, and whatever else happens to wander into my field of view.

I’m particularly interested in ideas that challenge the way we’ve always done things.

Not because “new” automatically means “better.”

It doesn’t.

But “we’ve always done it this way” has never struck me as a particularly compelling design argument.

So I experiment.

I build things.

I ask too many questions.

Sometimes I discover a better way.

Sometimes I create an impressive pile of metaphorical wreckage and learn something from it.

Then I pick up the pieces and try again.

Isn’t that exactly the mentality we want to impart to our students?

Failure isn’t the end.

There is always another version.

And sometimes the idea that looked impossible at the beginning just needed someone willing to try building it.