Play the System
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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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Play the System Projects /

p405 We didn't start the fire

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This website, which attempts to understand the alarming situation in the US, was created in a typographically coded balancing act between Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and a New York Times political podcast (January 2025). Excerpts from the country's political history are mixed with lines from a pop song that suggest we have always been passively at the mercy of the course of events. But can we use this as an excuse to shirk our duty to actively shape and improve the world? Now that many of the achievements born out of the movements of the 1960s in the US are being acutely eroded, rolled back, and destroyed? Now that the fire is a metaphor that has become reality?