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

Surface

The Design Museum Launches a Nigo Exhibition with Olympia London, and Other News.

9月29日

Plus, a rare David Hockney "Dog Painting" comes to auction for the first time, and Art Basel parent MCH Group expands into Qatar and Miami. Photo by Josh Bratt.

Surfaceで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

The Design Museum Launches a Nigo Exhibition with Olympia London, and Other News.

Surfaceの他の記事

IFPDA’s Prints & Drawings Month Returns with Programs from The Met and Morgan Library Surface

Designer of the Day: Travis Grimm Surface

Zhou Xuerong Made Her U.S. Institutional Debut at The Wang Contemporary Surface

Gordon Parks Foundation’s 20th Anniversary Show Opens in New York, and Other News. Surface

Peter Zumthor Expands Fondation Beyeler With a Trio of New Structures, and Other News. Surface

Citi and The Supper Club Bring an Exclusive Dining Experience to Chicago’s Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf Surface