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

Surface

Cristina Moreno of Ōmbia Studio Debuts El Dorado

10月26日

Shaped by a lifelong fascination with metalwork, pre-Columbian jewelry, and ancestral objects, the Colombian designer reinterprets these traditions through a contemporary lens The Tunjo Sconce and…

Surfaceで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Cristina Moreno of Ōmbia Studio Debuts El Dorado

Surfaceの他の記事

Monet’s Iris Sells For $56.2 Million, Setting France’s All-Time Auction Record, and Other News. Surface

Massimo Dutti Unveils Steven Sebring’s Unseen Portraits of Patti Smith in New York Surface

Designer of the Day: Barry Bordelon and Jordan Slocum of The Brownstone Boys Surface

Richter and Baselitz Paintings Lead Art Basel Paris Opening Sales at $10 Million Each, and Other News. Surface

A Fête for Adrian Danchig-Waring’s Final Bow Surface

Infiniti’s Head of Design, Taisuke Nakamura, on Shaping the 2027 QX80 Around Japanese Hospitality Surface