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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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p364 The Great Fainting

Author

Vanessa Köwing

Course

Politics in Motion

Design Disciplines

[Typography] [Motion Design]

Mediums

[Hybrid] [Moving Poster]

Technologies

[Adobe Aftereffects] [Adobe InDesign]

Subjects

[Feminism] [Literature]

Persons

[Virginia Woolf]

Fainting has long been regarded as more than just a medical phenomenon, which in past centuries was attributed particularly to women. It also describes a feeling of helplessness and fear that leads to a lack of influence and inaction. Especially in today's world, with its political and social crises, more and more people feel unable to counteract events.

Literature offers many examples of how powerlessness was felt and described in the last century, under what circumstances it occurred, and who suffered from it most. For this project, quotes from novels by three female authors from the last hundred years were selected. They show how both the protagonists and the writers themselves suffer from the powerlessness caused by patriarchal structures. Each of the three posters represents a facet of the feeling of powerlessness.

In Virginia Woolf's quote, the protagonist prefers a life of violence to a life of powerlessness, thus illustrating how much more violent powerlessness itself can be. Roxane Gay's quote shows how difficult it can be to find the right words for a life of powerlessness, and Ingeborg Bachmann struggles in her quote with the strength to overcome it.

The project stands for precisely this overcoming of powerlessness to draw new strength from it.