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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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p166 HN2W. Commandments of Procrastination

With his poster series, the student wants to counteract the consensus of a work ethic geared towards self-optimization. A work by the Zurich artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss from 1991 is the antagonistic starting point. In How To Work Better, Fischli and Weiss set out ten rules for goal-oriented work. Inspired by a work instruction discovered in a Thai factory, they developed their monumental typographic counterpart for the facade of a Zurich office building, which has also adorned a façade in Manhattan since 2016. In a parallel to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, the employer appears here as God and the artist duo as Moses, who mediates between him and working mankind. These rules, which are optimal for a capitalist entrepreneur in terms of the hoped-for increase in productivity, weave a narrative of self-optimization that rarely corresponds to reality. In order to create a counterweight to this narrative, the topic of procrastination is taken up and implemented typographically. To this end, strategies of procrastination are adressed, whose general familiarity emphasizes the subversive spirit of Fischli and Weiss and exposes the commandments How To Work Better as an entrepreneurial ideology, although it comes across as idealistically embellished. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to work better? The Ten Commandments for unfocused and inefficient work are an ironic counterpoint that provides a humorous but realistic and not idealistically distorted insight into the work process of people with a lack of concentration and drive. In conclusion, the thesis could be formulated that procrastinating workers more or less consciously evade the compelling logic of exploitation and optimization.