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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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 Week

OurCreative. crafts standalone brand identity for Asda’s Asquith 1965 range

10月29日

The new collection, officially titled Asquith 1965, draws its name from Asda’s heritage, marking the 1965 merger between the Yorkshire-based Asquith brothers’ retail business and…

Heritage & nostalgia Craft & material

Design Weekで読む ↗

OHLAB experiments with colour-blocking and cork in old and new buildings of Terreno Barrio Hotel in Mallorca Dezeen Interiors

The Gentleman by YSG Studio: A 1929 Potts Point Apartment Built for Two Very Tall People. Yellowtrace

A high-end historic renovation with custom woodwork Coco Lapine Design

Design Weekの他の記事

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

OurCreative. crafts standalone brand identity for Asda’s Asquith 1965 range

関連する記事

Macaulay Sinclair channels Crawford Market heritage for Dishoom Borough Design Week

Amstel updates global visual identity to highlight Amsterdam heritage Design Week

Life Beyond the Picture Books: Randolph and Marian Caldecott V&A Blog

OHLAB experiments with colour-blocking and cork in old and new buildings of Terreno Barrio Hotel in Mallorca Dezeen Interiors

The Gentleman by YSG Studio: A 1929 Potts Point Apartment Built for Two Very Tall People. Yellowtrace

A high-end historic renovation with custom woodwork Coco Lapine Design