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

Yanko Design

HOZO said hobby knives were dead, then built their best one yet

10月15日

A little over a year ago, HOZO basically wrote a eulogy for the hobby knife. Their NeoBlade came in swinging with ultrasonic vibrations, promising an end to blades that snag, skip, or crack a…

Yanko Designで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

HOZO said hobby knives were dead, then built their best one yet

Yanko Designの他の記事

Xbox finally made a Nano controller that fits in your hoodie pocket Yanko Design

This Tiny Prague House Opens Like a Giant Wardrobe Yanko Design

This Compact Wooden Desk Unfolds to Reveal a Workspace Full of Hidden Surprises Yanko Design

Privacy Without More Walls: A Forest Villa Concept Yanko Design

Acer’s new 5G phone comes with a microSD slot, a headphone jack, and a display on the back Yanko Design

Weber’s EG-1 Coffee Grinder Tackles Static and Hidden Grounds Yanko Design