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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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p156 Glitch Manifesto

Glitch is a flaw in the system, a form of refusal, a strategy of non-fulfillment. “We must welcome the glitch with open arms to overcome binaries and limitations that define gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.”1 writes Legacy L. Russell in the manifesto Glitch Feminism. In this sense, the glitch aims to celebrate what causes discomfort. The glitch – originally a term for a digital-technical error—needs to be rethought and transferred to the real world of AFK (away from keyboard). The digital world becomes the medium for speculative creativity. New ideas and resources emerge for the permanent (r)evolution of bodies that change faster than the societies that produce them, and to which we are at the mercy of 'offline'. We need to encourage being wrong in a system that is not designed for all of us. We need to encourage experimentation, with the opportunity to thrive in failure. To disrupt patriarchy, we need to receive the glitch as something that is learned as a mistake in our Western European society, but can be a fundamental approach for change in intersectional feminism. tear it all open! usurp the body! be the glitch!

  1. Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London and New York: Verso, 2020.