Only one minor at Dartmouth finds students building roller coasters into the wee hours of the morning and taking over dorm common rooms as they cut up pieces of paper into as many different square variations as possible — Human-Centered Design. The most popular minor at Dartmouth, the HCD program focuses on developing students’ creativity and innovation in “addressing human needs,” according to the Dartmouth Engineering website.
The six-course HCD minor is broken into three sections of requirements: an introductory course in engineering problem-solving and design thinking, two social science courses and three design electives.
Associate professor of engineering Eugene Korsunskiy said that one of the key aspects of the HCD minor that makes it so popular is its interdisciplinary nature. Given that it is a minor and not a major, students can layer other aspects of their liberal arts education with the creative problem-solving mindset they develop through the HCD minor, he explained.
The minor also allows students, who tend to crave hands-on experience through which they can see the results of their knowledge, the opportunity to translate knowledge into impact, according to associate professor of engineering and co-founder and director of the HCD minor Peter Robbie.
“Students are really passionate about having impact,” he said.
Cognitive science major and HCD minor Addy Reid ’27 said that she hopes to use what she learns from her HCD courses to help solve food systems and community engagement issues. She is pursuing work opportunities at companies that research how people interact with spaces and how the design of spaces, both indoor and outdoor, can help solve problems that communities face.
“Human-centered design is a method, not a field,” she said. “So you can really apply it to anything.”
While some, like Reid, wrote about pursuing the HCD minor in their Dartmouth application and hit the ground running as soon as they arrived on campus, other students didn’t plan on pursuing the minor until later in their Dartmouth experience. Meghan Kerfoot ’26 took ENGS 12 on a whim during her freshman spring.
“After taking the class, I basically changed my entire major and academic trajectory at Dartmouth because I loved it so much,” Kerfoot, now majoring in engineering modified with economics and minoring in HCD, explained. “I think it’s the best combination of creativity and problem-solving, analytical thinking and preparing you for literally anything you’d want to do in your life.”
Reid also highly recommended the course.
“I think it’s a class that everyone should take,” Reid said. “It totally transformed the way that I approach problem-solving and collaboration with others.”
Although some version of ENGS 12 has existed at Dartmouth since the 1980s, the HCD minor was only introduced in May of 2014.
Beyond ENGS 12, Kerfoot and Reid both highlighted ENGS 15.10: “Narrative Design for Innovators” with lecturer Nina Montgomery as one of their favorite classes within the HCD minor. Reid said Montgomery had become a “huge mentor” to her.
For their final project for the class, students had to create “a Dartmouth improvement project,” where they were tasked with addressing a certain aspect of the Dartmouth experience, Kerfoot explained. She and her team chose the HCD minor for their project and got to present their solutions to President Beilock and the dean of Thayer.
“Our solutions are actually getting implemented, which is amazing,” she added.
Additionally, Aren Carlson ’27, an economics major with HCD and studio art minors, enjoyed taking ENGS 21: “Introduction to Engineering” during his sophomore summer.
“That was a really fun process because it’s very start-up oriented,” he said. “You sort of recognize a problem, make a product and prototype it. That sort of experience is really invaluable. It’s pretty rare for students, especially non-engineering students, to get experience with that.”
Many HCD minors are involved with Design Corps, a student program through the Design Initiative at Dartmouth that works with groups and departments on campus to consult and solve design problems. For example, Kerfoot has worked on projects with the Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth College Fund.
HCD students have also applied the minor’s teachings to their own projects. For the past year and a half, Carlson has been working on a 3-D printed, custom-fit footwear company with two other ’27s. The start-up originated from interviews Carlson conducted with runners during his sophomore fall, where he found that most people’s footwear purchases were influenced by how they fit, as opposed to their aesthetics.
Through their initial research, Carlson and his team identified older people as a specific focus group, since they tend to have more podiatric needs as they develop conditions like bunions and plantar fasciitis. Now, they are user-testing shoes with local community groups, namely senior retirement centers such as Kendal at Hanover.
“It’s been really cool, actually talking to people about what sorts of problems they’re facing with their feet and what they wish shoes in the market currently provided,” Carlson said. “You learn all sorts of things about people and the human experience.”
However, the skills that the HCD curriculum teaches are not limited to conventionally creative or design-oriented professions, according to Korsunskiy.
“We are not trying to graduate professional designers, necessarily,” Korsunskiy explained. “I love that people who are HCD minors are going on to become neurosurgeons because they’re going to be better, more patient-centered doctors. I love that people are graduating from the HCD minor and going on to law school and eventually ending up in public policy-type settings where [they have an] understanding of how [to] respond to the needs of your constituents and creatively put in place policies and processes and laws that make people’s lives better.”
Regarding the implications of generative AI, the HCD minor is open to both opportunities and threats, according to assistant professor of engineering Rafe Steinhauer.
Because the HCD minor exists within a liberal arts context, it is not as focused on developing deep, tangible skills as a design school might be, Steinhauer said. Therefore, AI can help expedite the learning process for tools such as Adobe Photoshop.
“For me, that’s really an exciting place because now we can focus much more on the vision and creativity and less on, like, how do you use the lasso tool?” Steinhauer said.
However, Steinhauer also expressed worry that the use of AI could blunt human creativity skills.
The HCD community recently welcomed a new senior faculty colleague, Beth Ames Eagle, as the Director of DIAD, according to Robbie. She previously developed and directed the interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Design Engineering Program at Brown University, a joint-degree program between the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown’s School of Engineering.
“There’s big things coming for the minor,” Carlson said. “They’re just constantly putting resources into it too, so it’s growing at a really fast rate, and I’m excited to see where it goes.”
Jenny Piao ’29 contributed to the reporting of this article.
