An Open Standard
The Human-First Design Principle
The discipline behind everything we build — published so any team can adopt it. Version 1.0 · July 2026 · CC BY 4.0
The Principle
Six commitments
Applied to every engagement, every artifact, every line of code.
Before tools, frameworks, or vendors — we name the people who will live with what we build, and what success means to them.
We design alongside your team and your beneficiaries. Decisions are transparent, reversible, and shared.
WCAG 2.2 AA is our floor, not our ceiling. Inclusive design widens impact and reduces long-term cost.
We collect only what serves the human, keep it only as long as needed, and explain what we do in language people can read.
The team who runs the system is a first-class user. Docs, dashboards, and runbooks ship with the product — not after it.
Uptime matters, but so does whether a caregiver got home earlier, a student learned faster, or a citizen was heard sooner.
Beyond the Manifesto
A principle you can lint against
The Human-First Toolkit
Most manifestos stop at words. Ours ships as a machine-readable rule corpus with runtime enforcement — one shared vocabulary from design review to CI. The toolkit is MIT-licensed and public in Preview — pre-1.0, moving fast, rough edges expected. Browse it on GitHub or talk to us about adopting it.102 rules with stable IDs
HUMAN-01, PRIV-04, UI-36 … eight rule families — human-first, privacy, safety, security, trust & operability, performance & cost, stewardship, and UI — each rule states its human consequence up front.
Libraries, CLI, and CI-ready audits
TypeScript and Python libraries sharing one rules API, a CLI that maps changed files to the rules they must satisfy (cfh applicability, cfh lookup), and a browser-audit library you wire into Playwright — so the rules bite in pull requests, not just in slide decks.
Built for AI-assisted teams
An MCP server exposes rule lookup and changed-file applicability to coding agents (Claude, Copilot, Cursor), so your AI pair applies the same standard your humans do.
Adopting the principle
Free for any team, with or without us.
- 1
Take it
The principle text is licensed CC BY 4.0 — use it, adapt it, ship it in your own handbook, with attribution to Crafted for Human.
- 2
Wire it in
Adopt rule families one at a time: soft warnings first, hard gates when your team is ready. App-specific rules stay yours, as overlays.
- 3
Or do it with us
We run Human-First design reviews and adoption engagements — an honest audit of where your product stands, and a path to close the gaps.
Humans come first. Even in your codebase.
Adopt the principle freely — and if you want help making it stick, that is exactly the work we love doing.
The Human-First Design Principle v1.0 · © 2026 Code From Home · Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — you may share and adapt this text, including commercially, with attribution to Crafted for Human. The Crafted for Human™ name and mark are not licensed. Toolkit code is MIT-licensed separately.