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“I Had a Dream last night …” sang John B. Sebastian at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The 1960s were a time of political and cultural upheaval. Protest movements, new ways of life, and artistic revolutions shaped an entire generation and continue to have an impact to this day.

Grid to Groove presents 16 works by students in the Communication Design program at HAW Hamburg. The course was supervised by Amyra Radwan and Prof. Heike Grebin.

Today we live in this once-celebrated future, but how much of that spirit of optimism remains? On the one hand, social awareness has expanded—for diversity, equal opportunity, and new ways of life. And yet our globalized world is dominated by commerce, crises, and war: there is little sense of harmony and peace. What went wrong?

Building on these historical shifts, the students explored individually chosen topics and presented their findings in the form of a website. They examined the extent to which the 1960s continue to shape our thinking, our society, and our visual culture to this day. A particular focus was placed on the transformation of the design process. In the 1960s, the approach to design underwent a fundamental shift: away from spontaneous, intuitive ideas toward a systematic and rule-based process. Grids, however, served not only as structuring tools but were also understood as a creative method for exploring new design possibilities.