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

Yanko Design

This 9-in-1 folding titanium ruler can draw circles, slice paper, and eject your SIM card

10月13日

Measure twice, cut once is solid advice that skips a few steps. Somewhere between the measuring and the cutting you also need a pencil, a square, a knife, and usually a level, and they are never in…

Yanko Designで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This 9-in-1 folding titanium ruler can draw circles, slice paper, and eject your SIM card

Yanko Designの他の記事

Redmi just debuted an ultra-affordable $42 monitor arm that hides your cables too Yanko Design

This 400-Square-Foot Tiny Cabin Has Two Porches and No Loft to Climb Yanko Design

Wedge Coffee Dripper Brews Without Resting on Your Mug’s Rim Yanko Design

Casio’s Baby Molly Watch Becomes a Bag Charm Without Tools Yanko Design

CleanMyMac just made a Screen Cleaning Perfume for your MacBook that smells like a pine forest Yanko Design

Why CMF’s New Milk Carton Speakers Are So Irresistible To Look At Yanko Design