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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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

Visual Atelier 8

Flora Lechner creates aluminium vase inspired by orthopedic braces

11月6日

EXO 01 by Flora Lechner transforms flower arranging into sculptural design Flora Lechner introduces EXO 01 (2026), a sculptural aluminium vase that uses a mechanical support system to arrange and…

Visual Atelier 8で読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Flora Lechner creates aluminium vase inspired by orthopedic braces

Visual Atelier 8の他の記事

Interview with Szilveszter Makó on the art of constructing imaginary worlds Visual Atelier 8

Artemest and GACHOT revisit 1990s New York loft culture Visual Atelier 8

Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana creates pink desert house in Mexico Visual Atelier 8

Pavillon wraps Quebec cottage in corrugated metal Visual Atelier 8

Pedestal gives Moon TV stands a softer metallic finish Visual Atelier 8

Birdie designs oak air purifier disguised as furniture Visual Atelier 8