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

DesignWanted

Sabine Marcelis builds rooms out of light for her first museum exhibition

10月31日

Few contemporary designers are as recognisable as Sabine Marcelis. With a design language built on pink and orange hues, light

DesignWantedで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Sabine Marcelis builds rooms out of light for her first museum exhibition

DesignWantedの他の記事

Grande Lume by Marazzi explores color and light at an architectural scale DesignWanted

ElectroGlide: making wheelchair mobility more accessible DesignWanted

Business of Design Week 2026 connects design, brands and cross-cultural exchange DesignWanted

Looking for balance: Matteo Ragni on Taami DesignWanted

Beyond the project: building a culture of learning in the design studio DesignWanted

Traditional Japanese gilding techniques brighten contemporary interior design DesignWanted