/

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.

Press F to search
Play the System / Workshops /

w18 Humboldt and the Wrath of God

Date

Oct 27, 2019

Course

Participants

Supervision

In preparation for the catalog project Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, we will examine Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) — a haunting and grotesque portrait of power, delusion, and the failure of colonial ambition. Each participant will create an individual typographic interpretation of the film in a 16-page booklet.

Using screenshots, selected dialogues, screenplay excerpts, or related texts, the film will be deconstructed and reassembled. Through selection, combination, and visual transformation, a personal reading of the material emerges.

The goal is to respond typographically and visually to the film’s grotesque and intense nature — its exaggeration, physicality, and linguistic excess - and its cinematic structure.

The project draws parallels between Aguirre and Humboldt: both venture into the unknown. Aguirre is driven by greed and the myth of El Dorado; Humboldt by curiosity, observation, and the desire for knowledge. Between scientific exploration and destructive conquest lies a tension to be explored typographically, visually, and conceptually.