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

Design Milk

Laneige Turns Skincare Customization Into a Four-Story Experience

9月16日

Laneige’s Seoul flagship is more than a conventional beauty store. Across four floors, oversized architectural installations transform the Korean skincare brand’s bespoke services into physical…

Design Milkで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Laneige Turns Skincare Customization Into a Four-Story Experience

Design Milkの他の記事

7 South African Designers to Know From Maison&Objet 2026 Design Milk

Venus Williams Serves Up a New Collection With Crate & Barrel Design Milk

What the iF DESIGN AWARD Reveals About Where Global Design Is Heading Next Design Milk

L’OBJET x Jessica McCormack Turns Jewelry Into Objects for the Home Design Milk

ROOM’s New Identity Puts People at the Center of Workplace Design Design Milk

The AWEchair Makes a Case for More Beautiful Accessible Design Design Milk