Play the System

Play the System
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is a platform for parametric design in graphic design. It documents the work of students and teachers at the Department of Design at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), who are investigating the significance of the system as a conceptual model and design method under the title “Parametric Design in Graphic Design.”

Design is less about intuitive, even ingenious “strokes of genius” and more about a holistic and rule-based (systemic and systematic) process of gaining knowledge and shaping form. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to design dynamic systems that both guide and inspire the design process.

Parametric design refers to this design in and of systems—with rules, their modes of operation, and systematic manipulability. The research project, led by Prof. Heike Grebin, is an integral part of teaching and aims to raise awareness of design as a performative process.

Play the System brings together selected study projects in which the system plays an important role as a design method – whether analog or digital. The works are created in a fruitful symbiosis of theory, design, and technology. Socially relevant issues and positions from philosophy, art, and avant-garde design from around 1900 to the present day are repeatedly discussed.

Play the System is an invitation to become aware of the systemic competence of graphic design and to gain the maturity to use the tools of digital design critically.

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Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt are among the most famous and successful scientists of all time. They researched, observed, and made notes. And wrote down all their findings in an attempt to understand the world. This unquenchable thirst for knowledge has been taken up in the design here. The notebooks of Alexander von Humboldt served as inspiration, in which he noted and recorded everything in strict order and yet in a criss-cross fashion: pages were glued in, sketches added or loosely inserted. The student has adopted this idea for her design, so that you have to leaf back and forth within the catalog, turn the book, and explore it in a certain way to obtain more information about an object, a text, or a picture.