The badge on a profile
Human Design, and why a member's profile might carry a word like “Projector”
Some members choose to show the Type their birth chart works out to. Here is what that is, how it is worked out, and what happens to the date it came from.
What it is
A system for describing how somebody is set up to work
Human Design was put together in the late 1980s by Ra Uru Hu. It borrows its structure from four older things — the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, the positions of the planets used in astrology, the chakras, and the Kabbalistic tree — and arranges them into one diagram called a bodygraph.
It is not a scientific claim and NODA does not present it as one. No study supports it, and nothing on this platform depends on it: no level, no permission, no decision about anybody. What it is, is a vocabulary — and a reasonably useful one — for a conversation members have with each other all the time: how do you actually like to work? Do you get going on your own, or once something lands in front of you? Some members find the answer it gives them apt, some find it wide of the mark, and most never turn the badge on at all.
Read it the way you would read somebody writing “I am a morning person” beside their name. It is an invitation to ask, not a measurement.
The five Types
The whole chart reduces to one of five, and only that one is ever shown
A bodygraph has nine centres. Which of them are defined, and whether one of the four that generate energy reaches the throat, decides the Type. That is the entire calculation behind the badge.
Manifestor
A chart with a motor wired to the throat and no defined sacral — initiating rather than responding.
Generator
A chart with a defined sacral — sustained energy, available in response to what turns up.
Manifesting Generator
A defined sacral with a motor also reaching the throat — the generator pattern, with a shorter route to action.
Projector
No defined sacral and no motor at the throat — oriented to seeing and guiding rather than to sustained output.
Reflector
No centre defined at all — the rarest chart, and the one most shaped by the people around it.
How it is worked out
Here, from the ephemeris, and never at somebody else’s API
A chart needs two moments: the moment of birth, and the moment roughly eighty-eight days before it when the sun stood eighty-eight degrees earlier along its path. The positions of the sun, the moon, the eight planets and the lunar node at each are read off a standard astronomical model, mapped onto the sixty-four gates of the wheel, and the pairs that complete a channel define the centres at either end.
All of that happens on this platform. A member’s birth details are not sent to a third-party chart service, because a date and time of birth is precisely the sort of thing that should not be handed to anybody who did not need it.
It is worked out once, when the member enters their details, and stored. The chart of a moment that has already happened does not change, and re-deriving it on every page view would be effort spent to arrive back at the same five-letter word.
The birth moment is private. The badge is voluntary. They are separate decisions.
- The date, time and place are never published. They are held apart from the profile, in a part of the database no public page is able to read. This is not a setting somebody could flip by accident — it is which table the information sits in.
- Entering them publishes nothing. A member can work out their chart, look at it, and leave it at that. The badge appears only if they tick a second box, and it carries the Type and one sentence — never a date.
- Untick it and the badge goes. The chart stays, for the member’s own eyes. Erasing the birth moment is a third, separate act, and it removes the chart and the badge with it.
- Nothing else reads it. The badge grants no level, opens no door, and is not used to match, rank or sort anybody. Nobody is asked for a date of birth, and a profile without one is not incomplete.
If you are a member
It lives in My Space
Sign in and open My Space; the section is called “Your Human Design badge”. You will need the date, the local clock time, and the time offset that was in force where you were born on that day — the time matters, because a few hours can move the chart.