Institute for Human Centered Design

The Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD) is a 35-year old international education and design non-profit organization committed to advancing the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages, abilities and cultures through excellence in design. IHCD was founded in Boston in 1978 as Adaptive Environments and changed its name on its 30th anniversary to have an identity more reflective of our wide-ranging work. IHCD meets its mission through an unusual mix of education, technical assistance and inter-disciplinary design services. Each activity informs the others for a dynamic interplay of expertise, learning and exploration. We are deep content experts in both accessibility and universal/inclusive design. IHCD understands accessibility as a floor or baseline for inclusive design and the practice of designing people across the broadest spectrum of ability and age as a dynamic activity as the heart of socially sustainable design. The IHCD team includes professionals across the design disciplines (architecture, interior design, industrial design, digital design), education, engineering and the humanities. It reflects the organizational commitment to diversity of age, ability and culture. Due to the extensive national and international network of individual and organizational collaborators, IHCD has an unusually rich and flexible expertise and capacity well beyond its core staff.