4-YEAR UG Professional Program
Human Centered Design
Program Overview
The Human Centered Design (HCD) program at SMI delves into a design approach that centers publics: the people, communities, and relations that form around a technology.
By working and learning with digital technologies, interfaces, digital fabrication, and research, we foster practitioners who develop a holistic approach to understanding and responding to how communities, environments, and technologies shape each other. HCD prepares you to research and design systems, services, spaces, and products that form meaningful interactions with the worlds around us.
In practice, this means learning by doing and looking beyond the person using a technology to understand who else is affected and what happens around it.
You will engage with complexity and learn to ideate, tinker, play, and express through design. The course will prepare you to develop a questioning, hands-on approach to technology. Upon graduation, you will be able to apply your practice across industries, including MNCs, startups, design studios, and R&D centers in India and abroad, as well as cultural and public-interest organizations shaping how technology is designed responsibly.
These roles may involve designing technology-based products, interfaces and services; working in design research and service design; shaping how AI and technology systems are held accountable; and preparing to become a leader in design thinking, making, and technological innovation.
Vision
The vision of the course is to create an interdisciplinary learning environment where students can creatively explore how people and publics experience, relate to, and are influenced by digital technology.
Design does not only affect the experience of the person who uses a product or interface. It also impacts who gets heard, who has to adapt, who benefits, and who gets left out. We use the word “publics” to describe the wider groups of people, communities, and environments that are affected by a design, even when they are not directly using it.
A ride-hailing app that changes its routing algorithm, for instance, doesn’t only affect the rider who opened it that morning; it reshapes traffic for a neighborhood, income for drivers, and safety for pedestrians who never touched the interface at all. The people, communities, and environments affected by these changes form a public, even when they experience those effects differently or were never directly involved in the technology.
The climate crisis is one example: it affects everyone, but not in the same way, and no one was asked to opt in. Behind an interface that feels weightless are decisions with larger consequences too: servers that run hot, draw power, and demand water and land somewhere. It’s this shift, from a narrow focus on the user to the broader idea of publics, that the course steers toward.
These ideas come together through three closely interlinked paths that define the learning space.
1. Locating the Self
This pathway begins from the premise that there is no view from nowhere: design is always practiced from somewhere, by someone, in response to a particular set of people,histories, and conditions. Rather than applying a generic method to a generic case, this path treats design as situated action: it asks each learner to locate themselves within the specific site they’re designing in, and to take responsibility for where their practice stands within it.
2. Moving Beyond the Screen
This pathway begins from the premise that digital technology is not limited to screen-based interactions. It focuses on designing with technology as an integral part of the physical environment for human experiences and asks learners to play and tinker with sensors, microcontrollers, code, and digital fabrication as full partners to software.
3. Moving Behind the Screen
This pathway begins from the premise that no system is truly autonomous or neutral. Designing for interactions inherently involves intervening in complex socio-technical systems, such as internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and advanced computational systems that increasingly shape these interactions. It asks learners to engage with invisible dimensions of design, whether it be infrastructure, labor or energy.
Across these paths, your work might involve making an interactive interface, understanding the cultural imaginaries of how different communities relate to technology, experimenting with sensors and physical computing, exploring how an AI system operates within a larger infrastructure, or investigating the environmental and social consequences of a technology. The intersections are where you begin to develop your own interests and design practice.
LEVEL
Undergraduate Degree
AWARD
Bachelor of Design (B.Des)
DURATION
4 Years / Full-time
Last Day to Apply
15 March 2027
For More information, please contact Manuel Beltrán (Assistant Professor) at manuel.beltran@manipal.edu
Course Structure
- Foundation introduces students to basic principles and tools of Art, Design and Technology as methods, tools and processes.
- Disciplinary Studios are learning spaces where students develop core disciplinary capabilities, while navigating a trans-disciplinary environment
- General Studies is a common and compulsory programme of study that integrates Humanities, Sciences, Maths, business and finance. Development and Policy Studies and also offers Languages (Spanish, French and German)
- Interim is an immersive introduction to practice in new and emerging areas of art and design and environmental exposure
- Electives are of three kinds – this program allows students to expand their skills, develop the interests as well as provide opportunities for travel exchange
- Internship/Apprenticeship is compulsory work experience done over the summer-break between the 6th and 7th semester
- Project based learning involves the application and synthesis of capabilities acquired. Two projects, pre-thesis and thesis, is culmination of the 4-year undergraduate program, which allows for demonstration of an integration of values, positions, capabilities and practice.
Learning Approach
In this program, you learn design by making. A project might begin with observing a situation or talking to people, then move through research, sketching, making, coding, prototyping, testing, and revision. You may work with physical materials as well as digital tools, and you will be encouraged to learn from what happens when an idea meets world outside the class. In practice, this means hands on work on real life projects with industry partners, inside immersive studios and workshops.
The course looks not just at experiences “on” the screen, but at how the presence of the screen itself molds and changes how people act and relate to one another. By understanding that technology never exists in a vacuum, socially or environmentally, you learn to design technology that expands what people can do, understand or decide for themselves, rather than technology that quietly decides it for them.
You will explore human centered, interaction, and experience design by using research and ideation, coding, digital fabrication, prototyping, and interactive data visualization. Your process will involve methods like narrative construction, storytelling, speculative world building, and sketching, as ways of connecting with the people and communities you design for, with or about. You will use this knowledge to design for the future, communicate concepts effectively through media, and develop experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and accountable to the publics they touch.
Capabilities
Imagine: Construct concepts in an unhindered and unbounded manner.
Make: Construct artifacts, things, and systems as demonstrators of ideas and concepts.
Speculate: Take risks while constructing plausible concepts even with limited information.
Discern & Align: Take an informed stance after perceiving, questioning, and distinguishing between information from different sources.
See & Connect: Consciously unearth and combine diverse experiences and information.
Be Honest: Be aware of and be transparent in articulating your position.
FAQs
Human Centered Design at Srishti Manipal Institute uses a design approach that centers publics — the people, communities, and relations that form around a technology, rather than treating “the user” as a fixed, generic category to be served. You will learn to research and design systems, services, spaces, and products that shape meaningful interactions between people, designed environments, and the natural world, while staying attentive to who those designs speak for, and who they leave out.
This course is for students who are curious about how people, technologies, and the world around them shape one another. You might be interested in interaction, products, services, digital technology, physical making, research, or emerging technologies, but also in the complexity of the questions and consequences that sit behind them.
You should enjoy experimenting, making things, asking questions, and looking at a situation from more than one point of view. HCD gives you the space to explore these interests while developing your own design practice.
The above-mentioned capability sets could lead to opportunities such as:
- After graduating, you could apply your skills in a range of design and technology contexts:
- In the IT industry, working on interaction, interface, and experience design, bringing a broader, relational lens to roles often framed narrowly around “the user”, like UI/UX.
- In design studios, R&D, and product development teams in small and large companies, focused on novel, cutting-edge interaction and interactive product design.
- In start-ups, small and medium enterprises, NGOs, and social enterprises, working on both product design and service-system design.
- In climate-tech, environmental monitoring, and sustainability-focused organizations, applying creative and technological expertise to design for a changing climate.
The program also gives you a platform to develop your own practice and to question the social, cultural, economic, and political role of digital technology in our lives. You may go on to contribute to existing organizations, challenge how they design and use technology, or build new practices and organizations of your own.