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

Icon

Christoph Hefti Unveils His Fantastical World at Zurich’s Museum of Design

10月2日

In his first-ever solo exhibition, held at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, textile designer Christoph Hefti invites viewers into his creative process and the imaginative worlds woven into each of…

Iconで読む ↗

Iconの他の記事

Inside Finarte’s joyful world of handwoven rugs and textiles Icon

KitchenAid introduces Luminaire, the latest expression of its Design Series, where an enduring kitchen icon becomes a study in light, material and texture Icon

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Christoph Hefti Unveils His Fantastical World at Zurich’s Museum of Design

Iconの他の記事

Inside Finarte’s joyful world of handwoven rugs and textiles Icon

KitchenAid introduces Luminaire, the latest expression of its Design Series, where an enduring kitchen icon becomes a study in light, material and texture Icon

Editor’s Picks: Our highlights from Lake Como Design Festival 2026 Icon

Antao Earth from Villeroy & Boch: Where material and finish become the key design principles Icon

Atelier HA designs MELT’s new Panthéon restaurant in Paris Icon

Panter&Tourron unveils cosmic-themed window displays for Hermès Icon