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

Sight Unseen

High-design vacation rentals in Ireland and Shelter Island, a show in an iconic modernist house, and more

8月19日

Plus: What's Sight Unseen's favorite rug of all time? Find out inside.

Sight Unseenで読む ↗

Sight Unseenの他の記事

I Expected to Love My First 3Days of Design in Copenhagen. But I Could Never Have Anticipated What Would Make It So Great. Sight Unseen

Four Perfect Parisian Apartments — Two of Which You Can Rent — and Three Exhibitions to See Now Sight Unseen

Sight Unseenの他の記事

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

High-design vacation rentals in Ireland and Shelter Island, a show in an iconic modernist house, and more

Sight Unseenの他の記事

An Iconic Midcentury Hotel Reborn, a Belgrade Hi-Fi Listening Bar, and More Sight Unseen

A Hotel in a 6th-Century Monastery, an Office Channeling 90s New York, and More Sight Unseen

SPOTLIGHT: A centuries old Murano glassmaker reinvents itself for the modern era Sight Unseen

A Greek gallery decamps to the beach, a beloved coffee shop opens in Chicago, and more Sight Unseen

I Expected to Love My First 3Days of Design in Copenhagen. But I Could Never Have Anticipated What Would Make It So Great. Sight Unseen

Four Perfect Parisian Apartments — Two of Which You Can Rent — and Three Exhibitions to See Now Sight Unseen