This book is assembled entirely from materials that a reader can, in principle, obtain and check. It contains no privately held documents that only its author can see, no anonymous informants, and no claims that rest on the author’s say-so. The method described at the opening, the separation of documented fact from the subject’s own account from the system’s internal framework from the testimony of named others, is also a method of sourcing, and this note sets out what the four registers were built from.
The documented biographical record rests on a small number of publicly accessible sources, used because they can be verified rather than because they are sympathetic. The founder’s birth, name, and the outline of his early life are drawn from his organization’s own published biography, from the public astrological database that catalogues him, and, for his adult life in Canada, from a trail of dated newspaper records, a marriage announcement, a university convocation notice, and a job-appointment notice, each consistent with one another. The unresolved year of birth is documented from the family’s own death notice set against those records. Where a single community-compiled history supplies detail the public record does not, the parents’ names, the hospital of birth, it is identified as a secondary source and reported with that limitation rather than promoted to fact.
The founder’s own account is drawn from his recorded words and his published writing. The eight-day encounter is reported from his own recorded tellings and from the published foreword to one of his foundational books, never from a witness, because there was none; it is carried throughout as something he said happened. His teaching, his self-description, and his shifting accounts of his own age and history are quoted from a body of recorded lectures and interviews spanning the early 1990s to the final period of his life. These recordings are the spine of several chapters, and every quotation drawn from them was verified against the recording, because auto-generated transcripts are imperfect and his wording matters.
The system’s own framework is reported from the system’s own reference works and official pages: the principal book co-authored with the school’s later director, and the public materials of the founder’s archive and the certifying school. These are used only to establish what the system says about itself, never to establish that what it says is true. Where the system’s own pages contradict one another, as they do on the founding year of its principal school and, in effect, on the dating of the founder’s institutions, both statements are quoted directly from the official sources so that the contradiction is the system’s and not the book’s.
The testimony of named others is the most varied register and the one carried with the most caution. It includes loyal witnesses, a long-standing student-director, a privately trained analyst who spoke at a memorial, a German student who wrote a memorial of his own; and estranged ones, the founders of the American operation, and the research partner who ran the system’s one validation study and later repudiated it. Each is identified by name, each is carried with their evident interest, devoted or estranged, and none is allowed to settle a question of fact the documents leave open. Where a loyal and a hostile witness describe the same trait, the coincidence is noted, because two opposed interests agreeing on a fact is the strongest testimony the register can offer.
Several bodies of public record do particular work. The German Human Design community’s own history and obituary pages establish the founding role and the chart-rights of Jürgen Saupe, facts the founder-centered history omits. The first-person memoir of the American founders documents the 1993 arrival in the United States and the 1997 introduction of the system’s central architecture. The court record of the Tribunale di Firenze, decided in June 2020, is cited from the public docket and the translated passages reproduced in the public record, and it carries the weight a neutral authority’s findings deserve. The United States trademark record documents the lapse of the application over the system’s name. For the contemporary reach of the system, this book relies on published market research, press coverage, and the public marketing claims of the chart platforms, each identified as what it is.
This book is the companion to a separate volume, ZENO: Zeno Dickson and the Erasure of Human Design’s Teachers, which documents in detail the institutional history of the system and the removal of its early figures from the official record. Where this biography draws on facts established at length there, the citation points to the relevant section of that work, and through it to the underlying public sources. The two books share a discipline and a documentary base; this one follows the life, that one follows the institution.
A word on what is deliberately absent. No living person documented in these pages was approached for comment, and none of their private communications appears here; the record relied upon is what they have themselves published or said on the record. Where the public record is silent, this book is silent with it. The aim throughout has been to make every claim checkable and every limit visible, so that a reader who distrusts the author can still trust the documents, and can go to them directly.