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

PAGE online

So riecht das Parfüm von Ärzte ohne Grenzen

10月17日

»Un parfum sans frontières« und das mit einer besonderen Duftprobe, die in den Anzeigen in deutschen Magazinen beiliegt: Mediaplus hat für Ärzte ohne Grenzen eine Kampagne entwickelt, die auf ganz…

Japan-inspired

PAGE onlineで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

So riecht das Parfüm von Ärzte ohne Grenzen

関連する記事

Selbstbewusst als Kreative: Auftreten, verhandeln, Grenzen setzen PAGE online

A 1908 Japanese Prison Finds New Life as a Luxury Hotel Design Milk

A Curved Timber Core Divides This Compact Kyoto Home Without Closing It Off Yanko Design

Art, sound and a very small house: Three Tokyo exhibitions to see in October Monocle

Rezen transforms hotel stables in Australia into "raw and direct" wellness centre Dezeen Interiors

I IN contrasts concrete architecture with bright colours in Andersson Bell Tokyo store Dezeen Interiors