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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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p374 The Search for the Value of Things

Everything has a value. Everything needs a value if it is to be exchanged, traded, valued, or used, if it is to be relevant to the market economy, to society, or to society as a whole. We create things, we create values, we assign values to things (or judge them by them) in order to be able to compare, classify, and catalogue them. This process is given a platform here. So that everything is right.

Two levels are necessary to structure the search for values: a neatly sorted list of calculation steps, and the chaotic, unfiltered research process in the background. The result is a collection of values of various dimensions, so that everything can be calculated in the end.