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

Francisco Costa Builds a World of His Own

10月7日

At Costa Brazil's new Hudson Yards flagship, the designer turns his private world of books, objects, and Brazilian references into a space that feels like an extension of his home.

Surfaceで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Francisco Costa Builds a World of His Own

Surfaceの他の記事

Sophie Elgort Steps in Front of the Camera for Season Two of “Portrait Mode” Surface

Phoenix Art Museum Receives a $5 Million Donation, and Other News. Surface

McLaurin & Piercy Introduces the Kamal Wallpaper Collection Surface

Tiffany Shlain Debuts “If These Walls Could Talk: Women of the Hotel Chelsea” Surface

Tarini Sethi Turns Stainless Steel Into a Walk-Through Utopia for Frieze Sculpture Surface

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Positions Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock as Artistic Peers, and Other News. Surface