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

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‘We have to rethink the way that we’re designing department stores.’ Olivier Bron on the future of Bloomingdale’s

9月29日

If you have been reading headlines about department stores in the US recently, it might seem all doom and gloom, thanks to the demise of former titans of the sector such as Saks and Neiman Marcus .

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‘We have to rethink the way that we’re designing department stores.’ Olivier Bron on the future of Bloomingdale’s

Monocleの他の記事

As fashion struggles in today’s economic realities, it’s time for brands to cultivate a true following Monocle

Milan isn’t Italian design’s only hot spot. You’ll also find it on the sunny banks of Lake Como Monocle

‘We don’t need to shout to reach the right people.’ Agnona’s CEO and creative director on the luxury brand’s next chapter Monocle

Fledgling reporters are sparking up Japan’s news channels – but where have they gone in the West? Monocle

Riviera renaissance: Inside the revamped, historic Monte-Carlo Beach hotel Monocle