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

V&A Blog

Brand new museums deserve brand new approaches to wayfinding with Fieldwork Facility

10月26日

Have you ever thought about how museums help you find what you’re looking for? Wayfinding and labelling play a big part in how visitors explore objects. That’s why we...

V&A Blogで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Brand new museums deserve brand new approaches to wayfinding with Fieldwork Facility

V&A Blogの他の記事

Industrial action on 29 and 30 October suspended – all V&A museums open as usual this week V&A Blog

Singing Late Medieval Spain: a musical performance under the Torrijos Ceiling V&A Blog

From the shore to the store: shells in Wedgwood design V&A Blog

5 things that inspire Gabriel Moses V&A Blog

Look What I Found with Remiiya Badru V&A Blog

Join our Digital Meetup to build connections through creative technology V&A Blog