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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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p344 Stream of Emotions

Like, love, sad, angry. Around 6000 short messages are written every second on Twitter (now X). This mass of data produced is not only interesting in terms of its content, but also because of its inherent mood. Stream of emotions is the result of an investigation into the extent to which generated data can be analyzed and communicated creatively in real time. The script uses a software library for analyzing sentiment, which is based on the AFINN lexicon resulting from a research project. Each word entry is assigned a value that is either positive, negative, or neutral. This allows the mood of a short text to be determined with a relatively high degree of accuracy. The core of the work is a binary stream of positive and negative keywords that compete with each other and form spontaneous pairs of opposites. But when exposed and removed from their context, they also lose their meaning. Only at second glance do the complete tweets running in the background allow them to be categorized in a context of meaning. The Stream of emotions thus also raises the question of how well algorithms can understand us.