Undergraduate courses

Human-Centred Design Minor

(available from August 2025)

What is Human-Centred Design?

The HCD Minor is a human-centred design specialisation within SUTD’s curriculum, focusing on the integration of humanities and social sciences methods—such as ethnography, behavioural science, and cognitive psychology—to optimise user interactions with technology.

Leveraging SUTD’s distinctive expertise in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, this minor complements engineering and design education with human-centred research methodologies, business management skills, and AI-driven approaches to human-computer interaction.

The HCD Mission

To educate future technologists, civil engineers and design practitioners who will be:

• Prepared for interdisciplinary work environments that demand collaboration between engineers, designers, and users.
• Equipped with methods to conduct user research and to apply findings from user research to technological design.
• Equipped with ethical and epistemological training to design for human-technology interaction, including AI technologies.

Course Requirements

This Minor is open only to eligible SUTD students matriculated from AY2024 onwards.

To graduate with the HCD minor, students must successfully complete the following courses:

• 02.003 Social Science: Understanding Behaviour, Culture & Society
• HCD Minor core course (TBA)
• Any combination of four HASS courses from the list of HCD electives below. This list will continue to grow as new courses are added.

Unlike other HASS Minors, the HCD Minor will also permit students to substitute one to two HASS HCD Electives with selected Pillar Electives and (with approval) Master of Science in Technology and Design in HCD graduate courses. The maximum number of course substitution is two.

• One of the HASS Elective courses may be substituted with any of the following pre-approved Pillar electives:
  • 50.006 User Interface Design and Implementation
  • 60.005 Human-Computer Interaction and AI
  • 40.230 Design for Sustainability
  • 30.123 Healthcare Product Design
• With permission granted by HASS Cluster, no more than two HASS electives may be substituted with the following courses from the MTD in Human-Centred Design:
  • 02.532 Human-Centred Design for Information Visualisation
  • 02.533 User Experience: Understanding Culture for Design
  • 02.534 Humanistic Design: Equity and Inclusion in the Age of AI
  • 02.535 Management of Design and Technology

Step-by-Step Guidelines

1. Declare PBM Minor before the beginning of Term 4. This can be done in the student portal.
2. Term 4 – Enrol in the HCD core course.
3. Term 5 through 8 – Enrol in one of the approved HCD electives from the table below.

For more information on our application process, please refer to this document.

For students who intend to participate in Global Exchange Programme (GEXP), the overseas HASS courses must be approved for HCD mapping. All student’s requests for new course mapping must be submitted with a brief justification on why the class meets the criteria for the minor.

HCD Electives