Education is undergoing deep and persistent change. Here are three of the most prominent aspects of that change:

1. Our expectations and perception have changed. People have stopped being passive consumers of education and become empowered as customers. Today, we’re pro-actively scrutinising our experience of public products and services. We want value for money. We seek quality.

2. The proliferation of Open Source technologies, cloud computing and abundance of prototyping apps all show how the barriers to playing in this space have all but evaporated. Product development is now cheaper, faster and more accessible to a far larger group of people.

3. Teachers, teaching and learning have all changed. Learning is more collaborative and social than ever. Teachers and textbooks are no longer the only source of content. Teachers have been appointed (although often quite informally) into new roles - as curators, facilitators and mentors. They have become both the path and the barrier to using technology in the classroom.

These changes make the education space one of the most exciting places to work. Disruption is accelerating as we witness the death of traditional, ‘big education’ and the birth of many new forms of learning.

At Made by Many, we are also working with educators and students within our side-projects, Hackaball and tEchDU. All of this experience has taught us that teachers are the world’s most brilliant hackers. Time and again, we’ve seen them hack tools and products and services and make them do things their designers could never have imagined. They know the classroom better than anyone else, and yet the traditional structures of ‘big education’ left many of them out of the discussion about what happens next. Too often, teachers have been the victims of someone else’s brilliant idea or vested interests.

We have learnt more from working with teachers than we have with any other distinct group of users. It’s been a privilege to work together with our clients and teams on projects that reach into the future of learning. Now we’d like to share some of the things we’ve learnt.

There are different ways of looking at educational product and service design. At Made by Many we aim to make meaningful stuff, and teachers have illuminated our thinking every step of the way. If you’re designing for education, we hope this report will resonate with you and would love to hear about your experiences. If you’re new to the space, hopefully the report will help provide a way in.

Our study is divided into four categories. Each of them tackles a slightly different set of challenges and aims for a distinctive kind of takeaway.

Firstly, as product and service designers we can’t stress this enough: know who your user is and remember that you’re designing for them. If you want your product to be used, it has to be useful. It may seem like a no-brainer, but nearly half of failed technology startups die because there’s “No Market Need” for what’s been built.

A simple way to avoid this issue is to lose any sense of preciousness about your own opinions, and make friends with your users. With teachers, we’ve only ever had great experiences by involving them in our design process from the very outset and constantly throughout. We often talk about ‘teacher-centric design’: for us it has become a very real advantage.

You should keep them in the loop throughout the whole product cycle. Include them in testing; give them a feel for your technology and an opportunity to use it. There’s a whole bunch of perks other than just ‘building the right thing’ that come out of this kind of activity – mostly around adoption and marketing of your product – which are at least as important. Remember that a teacher’s job is to teach, and they won’t teach something they don’t understand.

The second part of this study presents some provocations. They are deliberately challenging, and designed to make you think in new ways. We want you to view challenges as product opportunities rather than obstacles. Most of our provocations emerged from recent shifts in the classroom environment - such as the changing role of the teacher, for example. For teachers, these are all just realities of their world and they need to be taken into consideration when designing new products.

Have you ever thought of how to guarantee that your product is used in the way you originally intended? The third part talks about ways to optimise solutions in order to get the maximum value out of them for both teacher and learner. The main objective here is to get you thinking about how you can build meaningful things for the school ecosystem and beyond. That might mean less is sometimes more, or that it’s about how it’s used, not what it is.

Speaking of maximising and proving value: there is a raft of stakeholders waiting to assess whether your technology makes any sense in terms of formal learning objectives and whether it contributes to a brighter future for children. Quite often you’ll be navigating rather peculiar challenges like having to keep offline records for the work you’ve done online. The revolution has definitely started, but it’s going to take some time! Don’t get frustrated!

We can’t imagine a better time to publish these insights. With the market shift, the world of education is at a crossroads of teachers and industry. The opportunity that presents itself is unprecedented, and inevitable. Product designers and teachers need to start working together. Teachers realise that they need to be involved in the design of the future of education, and we should make this happen.

We’d love to hear what you think about our provocations and to learn about your own experiences. If you’d like to talk more about making services for education you can email us on education@madebymany.com or tweet @nikajaneckova.

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Thank you for reading.