A short guide to the three layers that appear in every Gene Key entry in this atlas, and how to keep them apart.
The hexagram is ancient. Sixty-four figures of six lines each, ordered in the King Wen sequence, with a core text conventionally dated to the Western Zhou period and commentaries accumulating for centuries afterward. The meanings given for the hexagrams here are drawn from that classical material, which is documented in detail and independently checkable.
Human Design is from 1987. Originated by Alan Krakower, who took the name Ra Uru Hu, following an experience he described as an eight-day transmission on Ibiza in January of that year. It assigned the sixty-four hexagram numbers to centres and channels in a body diagram and gave them psychological readings. Its account of its own origin is a revelation claim, described here as such.
The Gene Keys is from 2009. Developed by Richard Rudd, who taught Human Design with Ra Uru Hu for several years before diverging. It kept the sixty-four correspondences, the wheel and the chart calculation, dropped the bodygraph, the types and the strategies, and added the Shadow, Gift and Siddhi spectrum and a contemplative method.
So: one ancient structure, one modern mapping onto it, and one recent reworking of that mapping. Where a Gene Keys entry states what the hexagram traditionally means and then what Rudd makes of it, the two statements are of different kinds and rest on entirely different sorts of evidence. That contrast, rather than any judgement about whether the system works, is what these entries are for.
Sources The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower) with Gene Keys: Embracing Your Higher PurposeRichard Rudd, The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.)