Dominique Sciamma, former director of Strate School of Design (2013 – 2020), talks about his collaboration with Beecome.
How would you define the collaboration between Beecome and Strate?
“Working with Beecome is more than collaboration, it’s a real relationship.”
On both sides knowledge, expertise and, above all, vision comes first. A vision of what school life can be, a vision on collaboration and sharing within school grounds.
What is great about our relationship with Beecome is that we don’t deal with just a service provider, but rather real people who builds together with us new work and life dynamics for the school. That’s the only way it can work.
If it were just a matter of installing new tools within an organisation, it would simply be IT. But we’re not talking about IT, we’re talking about life.
“The life of a school is all about ideas exchange, sharing, working together, in short, it’s life in itself.
Well, in that case, Beecome, it’s life!”
How do you see the evolution of collaboration tools within the Education sector?
It’s a future we’re slowly building, a field of investigation, research and practice. Technologies change all the time, so do learning practices and student culture. This is a very important to always keep in mind.
There are those who design, then there are those who use it. Those who design are, in general, a little older than those who use it. Those who use it have practices that they invent, that they impose, and which requires some synchronizing to their issues and in general, to their culture.
That’s the other challenge for this type of platform. How to stay connected to your target? How to stay connected to that specific generation so that you’re always in sync? It’s constant work because it’s forever changing, it’s forever adapting.
Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, have created a revolution for communication and the way we work today.
Taking into consideration these generational paradigms is not so simple when it comes to such industrialized communication platforms. Speacially now when they’re moving towards more specific sectors such as Education.
“It’s not a computer scientist’s job, it’s a designer’s job. Good thing we’re a design school, so making this collaboration happen was a very straightforward choice.“
How do you feel about international collaboration?
International collaboration is a big challenge from a cultural point of view. Setting up Beecome in India or setting up Beecome in Singapore are two very different things.
So the question to be asking ourselves is “How do you articulate, how do you synchronize with the local culture?”
And for that the relationship with the school principals is going to be crucial. They are the experts, the ambassadors and the referees for a successful implementation process.
For us, international collaboration is way to continue the Strate project, which is not only about a common curriculum, but also about the way we live and work together. That’s essentially what it’s all about at the end of the day.
Curriculums may change, but the way we decide to work and live together will never change at Strate. We are one big living organism.
“We love it. It’s all in the making, it’s all in Beecome.”
