How a Human Design Chart Is Built
Human Design describes how a person is built to make decisions and to use their energy. It brings together astrology, the I Ching, the chakras and the Kabbalah. The chakras became its nine centers, and the channels between them recall the paths of the Tree of Life from the Kabbalah. These descriptions introduce each part of a chart, they don't replace a reading.
The chart starts from astrology. The outer rings of the wheel, called the Rave Mandala, show the signs of the zodiac, with the Sun, the Moon and the planets where they are at the moment of the chart. Inside them, the 64 gates of the I Ching divide the same circle, each gate is a hexagram with six lines, and so every planet falls in a gate and in a line.
Those gates light up the body graph in the middle. In a birth chart they're black for the moment of birth, called the Personality, the side a person is aware of, and red for about three months earlier, when the Sun was 88 degrees before its place at birth, called the Design, the side that works without them noticing. When both gates at the ends of a channel are lit, the channel connects two centers and both of them become defined.
Zodiac
The outer ring shows the twelve signs of the zodiac as astrology uses them, each covering 30 degrees of the circle that the Sun, the Moon and the planets move along.
Planets
The dark ring shows where the Sun, the Moon and the planets were at the moment of the chart, together with the Earth and the Nodes of the Moon. To keep the wheel readable it only holds the planets of the first row below it, the Personality of a birth chart or the planets of the moment in a transit, and the other rows are on the body graph. The Earth is always opposite the Sun and the South Node is always opposite the North Node. Chiron is shown too, but it doesn't activate gates.
Gates
The next ring divides the same circle into the 64 gates of the I Ching, each with its number and its hexagram of six solid or broken lines. Every gate covers 5.625 degrees and is divided into six lines, one for each line of its hexagram counted from the bottom, so each planet falls in one gate and one line. The gates that the planets on the wheel activate are tinted in the color of the center each gate belongs to.
Body graph
The body graph in the middle has nine centers and the 36 channels between them, and each end of a channel is a gate. The half of a channel at an activated gate is black when the Personality activates it, red when the Design does and striped when both do, and the number of every activated gate is filled in. When both ends of a channel are activated, the channel and its two centers are defined and shown in color.
Rows of planets
The rows below the wheel list the gate and line of every planet, in black for the Personality at the moment of birth and in red for the Design about three months earlier. Each is written as the gate, a dot and the line, so 55.6 is line 6 of gate 55. A small triangle pointing up marks a line that's exalted, and one pointing down marks a line in detriment, which tells which side of the line's meaning is emphasized.
Overview
The Overview sums up a chart in five properties. The Type and the Authority come from the defined centers, the Profile from the lines of the two Suns, the Definition from how the defined centers connect, and the Incarnation Cross from the gates of the Suns and the Earths.
Exaltation and detriment
In Human Design each line of a gate has planets that exalt it and planets that put it in detriment. When one of them activates the line, a triangle marks it, pointing up when the line is exalted and pointing down when it's in detriment, which tells which of the two sides of the line's theme comes forward. Both triangles show when both apply. The same planet anywhere in the same gate, or in the gate at the other end of a channel, fixes the line too.
Outlined triangles
An outlined triangle marks a fixing that only holds for now, because a planet of another chart drawn with it sits in the same gate or in the gate at the other end of the channel, while a filled triangle is a fixing of the line's own chart.