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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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p89 Concrete forms. Loose thoughts

Richard Paul Lohse worked with regimented methods as early as the 1940s and applied them to his art. He created modular and serial fields of color that develop their dynamic only through their strict systematics and give the viewer the impression of movement. Paintings that today would be called programs. Lohse conceived what exists today. What would happen if we applied the rules he laid down decades ago to design with new technologies? What happens if we change one or more of the parameters of his paintings or transfer them to free forms of expression? Are we more efficient, even more creative, through strict systems, or do we feel restricted? The students analyzed selected works by Lohse and experimented with the methods and rules inherent to them. It was an attempt to transfer Richard Paul Lohse's thought model and design methods to the present day and to generate independent designs from them.