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

Packaging Europe

From breakthrough to buy-in: how packaging start-ups design for adoption

10月28日

From biodegradability to commercial viability, how are emerging materials innovators tackling performance, recyclability, industrial compatibility and cost?

Packaging

Packaging Europeで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

From breakthrough to buy-in: how packaging start-ups design for adoption

関連する記事

WA3RM: Inside Lundgren+Lindqvist Packaging Design Abduzeedo

Thirst designs canteen-inspired bottle for Archie Rose and Chris Hemsworth Design Week

The Body Shop returns the Pod to its packaging Design Week

Pentawards 2026: Living Wine Labels, Keystone Dippers, and 20 Years of Structural Packaging Design Week

Bill Rebholz Brings His Distinct Illustration Style to the World of CPG The Dieline

STUDIO HERRSTRÖM draws on car culture and carton typography for Milkshake rebrand Design Week