What is Humun Design?

Where it comes from

Here is the origin story as the system’s own keepers tell it. In January 1987, on the island of Ibiza, a Canadian named Alan Robert Krakower had an eight-day mystical experience: an encounter with what he called “a Voice”, which he said gave him the whole system. He took the name Ra Uru Hu, wrote down what he had received, published The Human Design System in 1992, and taught it until he died in 2011. (Jovian Archive, IHDS, Wikipedia)

The story practitioners pass on, by word of mouth rather than in any document, adds that the information was available to anyone that week. He was the one able to receive it and carry it to the rest of the world, and at least one other person who received it was not able to bear it. Nothing written stands behind that part, so hold it as lore.

The parts are older than 1987. The 64 numbers on a chart are the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, a text people have been reading their lives into for roughly three thousand years. The planets come from Western astrology. The nine centers are loosely borrowed from the chakras, and the way the pieces connect borrows from the Kabbalah’s tree of life. The literature also adds a layer of physics. Its keepers say the Voice told Ra that neutrinos have mass and carry the imprint, the neutrino stream, as practitioners call it, at a time when physics treated them as massless. Evidence that neutrinos have mass arrived in 1998 and won the 2015 Nobel Prize. Whether that is the physics catching up, or a lucky line in a story nobody can check, or a bit of both, which is where most of us land on most days, depends on how you hold the story, and we come to that next. No physicist has found a way to test the imprint part yet. (Wikipedia; Jovian Archive on the neutrino claim; Nobel Prize, 2015)

We put the story first because it matters. There is no laboratory behind this in the usual sense: no controlled study, no peer review. There is a story, a set of rules, and nearly thirty-five years of people testing it in the one laboratory each of us has, our own life. You can hold the story however you like. Between the two of us, we hold it differently. One of us holds it as a myth in the old sense of the word: a story people use to understand themselves. The other holds it as a claim about how the universe is built, one the sciences haven’t caught up with yet. Neither of us knows for sure, and both of us feel strongly, which is how most things go around here. We agree on what we won’t do with it, and that is what most of this page is about.

What a chart is

The chart is the seed packet: the variety, the light it leans toward, the water it wants, the season it wakes up in. The rest of this section is how the packet gets printed. A chart starts with two moments: the minute you were born, and a moment about three months earlier, when the Sun was 88 degrees back along its yearly path. Why that moment? In the system’s account, that is when consciousness is downloaded into the fetus, and the fetus becomes a separate conscious entity from its mother. The body’s unconscious “design” is imprinted then, and the conscious “persunality” is imprinted at birth. That is the system’s answer, and we pass it on as the system’s answer. For each moment, the positions of the Sun, Moon, lunar nodes and planets are sorted into 64 slices of the sky, one per hexagram. Those slices are the numbers on the chart. The nine shapes are centers, the lines between them are channels, and a channel lit at both ends is called defined. Each of the 64 slices is itself cut six ways into lines, and each line six ways again into colors, then six tones, then five bases, so the imprint can be read at four finer levels under the number you see on the chart. From that pattern the system assigns a type, a strategy, an authority (its word for how you make decisions), a profile, and a great deal more. (Jovian Archive, “Personality vs. Design”; Jovian Archive, on the 88 degrees)

Inner and outer authority

Authority comes in two kinds. Inner authority is what you can trust to make good decisions as the unique individual you are; the chart names where in the body it lives for you, and for nobody is it the mind. Outer authority is the mind’s proper job: once it is relieved of decision duty, what it knows becomes something to offer other people.

The astronomy is real and reproducible: anyone with the same birth data gets the same chart, to the second. Keep that fact in its place. An exact calculation doesn’t make the meanings true; the meanings are a separate question, and they are the whole point. We won’t use the precision as if it were proof, and you shouldn’t let anyone else either.

On this site we use the type names from 64keys, a software company started by two of Ra’s direct students, who were behind the camera for the filmed account of his story and have carried the system forward through decades of their own practice. They found the traditional labels “insufficiently meaningful” once their charts were being used at work. Both names appear on their charts, and here: Initiator (Manifestor), Builder (Generator), Specialist (Manifesting Generator), Coordinator (Projector) and Observer (Reflector). When Ra’s wording and the 64keys gloss differ, we read them side by side rather than pick one. They are two attempts at explaining the same information, and Ra had a big job that he did not finish, so in places the later refinement is simply further along. (64keys FAQ)

The chart is where you start. The parts that light up are the seed, and everyone is also conditioned by the people around them, if nobody else then the parents or whoever did the caretaking. Set a caretaker’s chart beside yours and specific influences come into view: the kinds of information they gave you consistent access to, the trellis you grew along. All of that is read from information that is publicly available.

What it doesn’t claim, and what we don’t

• A reading is not a diagnosis, a verdict or a fortune.
• It is not medical, legal or financial advice, and we give none.
• No standard laboratory that we are aware of has tested it, and we won’t claim one has.
• It does not predict your future. The chart describes tendencies: the seed packet, the variety and what it leans toward. What grows from there is up to you and the weather. The open parts of the chart are your area of study; the system calls them the places with “the greatest potential for wisdom”. (Jovian Archive, on open centers)
• It is not a substitute for a doctor, a therapist, or a friend who knows you well, though it can help you understand your body, your trauma and your tendencies in a conditioned world.

If a practitioner ever tells you that your chart requires you to do something, they have left the framework. Everything in it rests on your own authority. Take what’s useful and leave the rest, and that includes the authority to put the whole thing down.

What the critics say

Wikipedia opens its article by calling Human Design “a pseudoscientific theory and practice described as a holistic self-knowledge system”. (Wikipedia)

Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast spent an episode on it and concluded that it “lacks any theoretical basis and any set of falsifiable predictions that can be tested”. He also generated a chart for a birth he made up and got a complete, confident description. A chart describes a birth moment, not a named person, and someone is born in almost every minute, so the chart he drew is probably somebody’s. His point stands in the form that matters: the system will describe any moment with the same confidence, and whether a reading fits the person in front of it is the only test there is. (Skeptoid #770)

The best-known study behind the “it fits anyone” objection is older than Human Design. In 1949 Bertram Forer gave 39 students what they believed were personal profiles. Everyone received the same text, assembled from an astrology book, and they rated its accuracy at 4.26 out of 5. The effect now carries his name. Does that settle it? No. It settles what kind of claim this is, and it is the reason the useful parts of a reading are the parts specific enough to be wrong. (Forer, 1949; Barnum effect)

We know of no peer-reviewed, controlled test of Humun Design. What exists is field use. 64keys says its software has been “tried and tested for many years by thousands of coaches, therapists and management consultants”, and practitioners have been running their own informal experiments since 1992. That is experience, which is worth something, and it is not a controlled study. We would rather call it what it is. (64keys)

The critics are right that the evidence, in the laboratory sense, isn’t there. We would rather say that here than have you discover it later and wonder what else we left out.

If you like Myers-Briggs

Plenty of people who wouldn’t touch astrology will happily tell you they’re an INFJ. It is worth knowing what the research says about the MBTI. In a 1993 review, David Pittenger reported that even with a five-week gap, “as many as 50 percent of the people will be classified into a different type” on retest. In 1989, McCrae and Costa found that the four MBTI scales measure aspects of four of the Big Five traits, which have the stronger research record. And Jung, whose ideas the MBTI adapts, cast horoscopes for difficult cases “to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle”. (Pittenger, 1993; McCrae & Costa, 1989; Jung, letter to B. V. Raman, 1947)

None of that is a dig. It is the honest reason to use any of these systems: not because they are proven, but because they give you words for things you half-knew. By that standard, Humun Design is in the same family as the MBTI. It is a vocabulary chosen for its usefulness, with a stranger origin story and a great deal more detail.

If someone you love is into it

You don’t need to decide whether Humun Design is true to tell whether it is doing someone good. Look at how they are using it.

If you are worried, ask questions rather than passing verdicts. “What has it given you?” opens more doors than “that’s not real”, and it gets you a truer answer. It is also what we would ask of you in return: judge it by its use, not its origin, and we will do the same.

How we hold it

Here is what we actually do with it, in three moves.

1. Get the vocabulary. A reading gives you names for patterns you may already half-know. That is its first and largest gift.
2. Pick one thing specific enough to be wrong. Not “I’m a Builder” but “when I say yes from my head instead of my gut, I resent it within a week.”
3. Try it for a few weeks and keep what holds. When something doesn’t fit, you can shelve it, and that is fine. But in our experience the line that makes you say “that’s not me at all” is where the work starts, so sit with it a while before you shelve it. (The 5th gate story on the home page is the worked example.)

Our rules for ourselves

• We say “in our experience”, not “Humun Design says”.
• We never claim scientific backing.
• We answer the question you asked.
• We tell you when a reading isn’t enough.
• We get things wrong, and we would rather you said so. “Excuse me, I thought you said yes” is a fine thing to tell us.
• We don’t recruit. We borrow a line from the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous: attraction rather than promotion. If it is useful, people ask. (Tradition Eleven)

When we write about a chart, we try to describe only what we can see. In Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a Fair Witness asked the colour of a house on a hill answers, “It’s white on this side.” That is the standard: this is what the chart says, this is what you told us, this is what we noticed. Never: this is who you are. (Wikiquote)