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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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p66 Cage machine

Visitors to the exhibition can use the 'Cage Machine’ to create short lectures in the style of John Cage at the touch of a button: A random algorithm generates new texts from Cage's two lectures Lecture on Nothing1 and Lecture on Something2 . The visitor can follow on-screen how the words from the two lectures are put together to form a new, individual text. Each text is labeled with a serial number, date, and time of production, and a photograph of the visitor, who can take it with them and read it (aloud). All the texts will be collected and put together in a book. In this way, the book, which is produced anew for each exhibition, is defined by the visitors of the respective exhibition.

  1. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
  2. ibid.