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

← Hakken 週ごとのアーカイブ

Yanko Design

A rare Sony Walkman now powers this gorgeous wooden cassette tape wall

10月30日

Cassettes are selling again, which means more people own tapes and have nowhere sensible to put them.

Yanko Designで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

A rare Sony Walkman now powers this gorgeous wooden cassette tape wall

Yanko Designの他の記事

This Printer-shaped Chair Has Receipts… Literally! Yanko Design

Porsche made an espresso machine with La Marzocco, and this one has the Carrera’s ducktail Yanko Design

EVOLIA’s Sculptural Bracelet Tracks Wellness Without a Screen Yanko Design

This Ontario Cottage Puts a Covered Outdoor Room Between Its Two Halves Yanko Design

Copper-clad Maserati GranTurismo brings handcrafted luxury + gullwing doors to a bespoke grand tourer Yanko Design

Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars Yanko Design