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

Sauna Zaježová: from timber drying to a place to rest, in harmony with nature

10月24日

Sauna Zaježová, built by Guča arch. in 2025, takes as its starting point a common structure found in the rural

DesignWantedで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Sauna Zaježová: from timber drying to a place to rest, in harmony with nature

DesignWantedの他の記事

DESIGNART TOKYO 2026 gives a former highway a new creative role DesignWanted

Habit, Vibra, and Limen: the 3 new dimensions of design by Novamobili DesignWanted

SaloneSatellite carries 27 years of discovery to Jakarta DesignWanted

Iris Ceramica Group’s new releases present surfaces you can read with your eyes closed DesignWanted

Palaces for the people: on the importance of designing social infrastructure DesignWanted

A week of Estonian design: where a factory floor became a gallery DesignWanted