Human-centered design is an approach to creating solutions for problems and opportunities through a focus on the needs, contexts, behaviors, and emotions of the people that the solutions will serve. More recently, public agencies have begun to use human-centered design methods to define problems, generate solutions, and test them to improve the services that they deliver. Designers and public leaders are beginning to take human-centered design methods upstream from service delivery to the creation of the actual policies and regulations that dictate those services. This report provides: (1) a brief overview of the evolution of human-centered design; (2) catalogs examples of its use in the education sector; (3) explores how its methods and processes might be added to the policy research toolkit; and (4) outlines limitations, risks, and potential for next steps.