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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 / Workshops /

w8 Construction As Commentary

The workshop in preparation for Albert-Jan Pool’s lecture The Geometric Sans – A Bauhaus Myth? focused on a critical exploration of modular design: the grid as both a useful tool and a creative constraint. Each poster was based on a constructed or found underlying structure, into which typographic elements were carefully integrated. The process involved not only working with the grid but also questioning its limitations. This tension between structure and freedom was reflected on a conceptual level as well: together, the posters reveal a quote by Immanuel Kant: “The order and regularity in appearances, which we call nature, we ourselves bring into them—and would not find there, if we had not originally put them in ourselves.”