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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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p185 Humb Catalog

“There will probably come a time when humans will travel to distant planets. When that happens, we will take our deadly mixture of arrogance, greed, and violence with us and destroy this planet just as we have already done with our Earth,”1 Andrea Wulf writes in Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature. Humboldt recognized the bond between nature and humans and described it in his studies. Are these animal and plant species, which Humboldt discovered and catalogued at the time, affected by the changes in our environment? The Humb catalog addresses this question. 127 of the animal and plant species cataloged by Humboldt have been categorized according to the IUCN Red List for endangered species.

  1. Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.