There are two ways of understanding the notion of play: playing cards, dominos, checkers; or the play of a mechanical part when it is loose in its housing. I think, in fact, that the second is the angle from which we should envision play today. Play is not something that brings pleasure; on the contrary, it expresses a shift in reality, an unaccustomed mobility with respect to reality. To play today, in a certain sense, means to choose between two realities.
Virilio, Paul and Jerome Sans (Interviewer).”Game of Love and Chance: a Discussion with Paul Virilio.” in: Watson Institute. No Date.

In this experimental typographic studio, we will investigate graphic design as an iterative practice of game-playing, one which variously requires control and demands submission, in different degrees and sometimes at the same time.

In the modernist imagination, design, at its highest level, consists in the formulation of rules for the production of things. The production of the things themselves are left to others, further down the cybernetic pyramid. We will practice from both positions — rule-maker and rule-follower — in order to test this hierarchy and investigate graphic design as a procedural, conceptual, and social activity: as the formulation, interpretation, and human execution of rules for production. Along these lines we will also opens political questions about control and freedom.

In a series of short projects, we will play games with partners to edit, design, and produce an archive of printed matter. We will write and execute rules that provide instruction in (1) how to find, generate, and edit content, (2) how to give form to this content, and (3) how to give it material shape. We won’t know the outcome of each workshop until the rules are executed, but that’s the idea. We are executing programs, but as humans not computers, so the running of the program will be harder to predict — and more interesting!