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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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p199 In Spiral Dance

According to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, cyborgs are creatures of a post-gender world. They leapfrog the stage of primordial unity, redefining nature and culture. Cyborgs are oppositional, without innocence, characterized by partiality, intimacy, and perversity. They are also the offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, thus uniting systems of oppression. The cyborg as a life form is to be understood as regeneration rather than rebirth, as the reconstruction of a world with the utopian dream of renouncing all forms of dualism. In constructing this myth, Haraway questions existing relations of power and domination. She emphasises that responsibility for social relations means playing mind games with anti-scientific metaphysics bordering on science fiction, as well as rejecting the demonisation of technology and the willingness to learn new tasks that go hand in hand with new techniques. She uses the metaphor of the cyborg to show a way out of the labyrinth of dualisms. According to Haraway, this means the simultaneous construction and destruction of machines, identities, categories, relations, spaces, and histories. How can we evaluate this utopia from today's perspective? Does the mythology really promise a new, better world? How can we use the concepts and ideas to develop socially and overcome the limits of dualistic power relations? And is this the new world we wish for?