the human-centered design decal

If you want to access previous course sites, you can access them here:

Spring 2023: sp23.hcd-decal.org

If you want to reach out to course staff, you can email caldesigndecal@gmail.com

If you have a question for any individual course staff, you can find our emails on the syllabus. If emailing course staff directly, please put “HCD DeCal” in the email subject line!

The most important part of the course are the projects you’ll work on.

The first project is completed in groups of 4-5. Your group will focus on solving a problem that you all care about. You can express preferences for who you want to have in your group and we’ll try our best to honor them! Matching will be determined primarily by the issues that matter to you and your future groupmates. In this project, you will complete user research, synthesis, and begin the ideation process. The final deliverable, due halfway through the semester, will be a research report!

The second project will build on your first group project, but will be completed individually to allow you to explore ideas and implementations that intrigue you. You’ll complete the design process by coming up with solutions from your research and implementing them. You’ll ideate many divergent and convergent solutions, conduct evaluation testing to determine which solutions are viable, create prototypes, and repeat until you come up with a solution to your original problem!

Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to enroll every applicant. That being said, we look for individuals passionate about design—regardless of skillsets. Beginners interested in design are welcome and strongly encouraged to apply!

We focus mainly on your responses in the application form, and provide slight priority to those who've previously applied or are closer to graduating.

You can access the application at hcd-decal.org/app at the start of the semester.

We meet every Monday, 7-9 PM at Jacobs 310. Attendance is mandatory!

Our first class is September 11th from 7-9 PM in Jacobs 310.

Anyone! There are no prerequisites—this class is for anyone and everyone interested in learning about the theory behind human-centered design.

We strongly encourage beginners to apply!

In addition to the 2 hour weekly meetings on Monday, you’ll likely have to spend some time outside of class on homework and projects.

While the numbers will vary from week-to-week, depending on what your team is able to get done during class time and the nature of your project, we’d recommend budgeting 1-2 hours per week outside of class to complete projects and homework.

The Berkeley design community offers a myriad of other wonderful DeCal courses, like the web development DeCal, Figma DeCal, BigD (Brand Identity) DeCal, and many more which we also recommend you check out!

This DeCal differs in the fact that it is non-technical and doesn’t focus on any individual technology, tool, or implementation of designs. Rather we strive to teach the human-centered design process that can be applied to nearly any domain of work, be it design, engineering, biology, history, etc.