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Hakken 発見 /

Signal of the week

Japan-inspired · 9 stories, +9 vs last week

Japan-inspired: 9 stories in seven days, +9 on the week before.

A Minimalist Low-Cost Japanese Sketchbook Core77

This Tokyo Furniture Showroom Vanished Into a Traditional Japanese Inn Yanko Design

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TypewolfDaylight

TypewolfHeart & Soil

TypewolfDirty Vine

Core77Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-21-26 to 9-25-26) Here's what we looked at this week: KAIST develops a low-cost way to detect hidden cameras using your smartphone. Industrial designer Alberto Essesi's pen for precision sketching.

Core77Mafell's Beefy Portable Drilling Station for Timber Framers Traditional timber framing is still very much a thing in Europe. Timber framers often need to drill accurate holes for the pegs that will fasten two timbers, and these holes occasionally need to be…

Core77Raak Design Casts Light on a Medical Tool ENT doctors use nasal speculums to look inside a patient's nose. Typically the tool is held in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

Japan Design NetJapan東京藝術大学と三菱地所、都心型アートセンターの実証プログラムを2026秋より本格展開東京藝術大学と三菱地所が、大手町・丸の内・有楽町エリア（大丸有エリア）をおもな舞台に、都心型アートセンター機能の実証プログラムを2026年秋より本格的に展開する。同プロジェクトは、2022年の包括連携協定を起点に、大丸

Casa BrutusJapan〈tempo〉の最新モビールが見せる、浮世絵の雲と現代的デザイン。 September 28, 2026 | On Your Fridge | photo_Keiko Nakajima styling & text_Yusuke Takeuchi 浮世絵に描かれた雲を思わせる〈tempo〉のモビール《cloud S》。DRILL DESIGNが、切り出した4種のアルミパーツで柔らかな輪郭を描いた。 Sサイズ W50×H26cm。30,800円。

Yanko DesignMetMo turned a 1912 mechanism into the perfect hands-free tweezers for hobbyists and craftsmen If the name MetMo rings a bell, that’s because this small Leeds outfit has built its reputation out of taking old mechanical ideas nobody else bothered reviving and turning them into objects people…

MonocleMilan isn’t Italian design’s only hot spot. You’ll also find it on the sunny banks of Lake Como It’s easy to assume that Italy’s design world is made up of Milan – and Milan alone. The city is home to the likes of Dimore Studio, as well as shiny showrooms for big-hitter brands from Cassina to B…

BRUTUSJapan9月28日〜10月4日蟹座の運勢【ブルータス週間占い】蟹座の羅針盤童心に戻って道を固める金星（喜び）が蟹座にとって娯楽の部屋にあたる蠍座にいて、30日には水星（思考）も入ってきます。今週は、肩の力が抜け、楽しいと思えることを優先して動けるようになりそうです。好きなアーティストの新曲を聴いたり、好みのデザインの小物を探したりして、人生には大小のときめきが溢れていることを思い出しましょう。

World Landscape ArchitectureAdaptive Play at Archerfield Wetlands District Park The Archerfield Wetlands District Park exemplifies innovative adaptive re-use and redevelopment, transforming a decommissioned wastewater treatment plant into a vibrant, multifunctional park with…

Japan now

日本の今 · What's on view, what the Japanese-language press is covering, and this week's Japanese web — in English

On view

Japanese web this week from Responsive Web Design JP and MUUUUU

The wire AXIS and Japan Design Net, translated

How Japan designs in 2026 from Japanese studios' own trend reports

Sources

Fetched every three hours, linked to the original

About

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo