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

Nothing’s $399 Headphones Take Aim at Sony, Bose, and Apple at Once

9月29日

Consumer electronics have usually been opaque, literally and figuratively, but there was a time when manufacturers actually glorified transparent designs.

Yanko Designで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Nothing’s $399 Headphones Take Aim at Sony, Bose, and Apple at Once

Yanko Designの他の記事

No plugs, no batteries, no mess: this futuristic kitchen pad wirelessly powers your appliances Yanko Design

Standard TVs Filter Their Color, the Hisense UR8 Creates Its Own Yanko Design

This Tabletop Fireplace Does What Solo Stove Doesn’t: Burn Indoors Yanko Design

This Zippo case now hides a full DIY micro-toolkit inside Yanko Design

Genius ‘Tilted’ Apple Watch Band Makes The Entire Experience 10x More Ergonomic Yanko Design

One Table, 3 Games, Nobody Needs a Game Room Yanko Design