Design Indaba

10 stories

Design IndabaA New Standard ASICS and Karimoku sustainably decommission sneakers by giving them a second life as furniture ASICS and Japanese furniture brand Karimoku New Standard (KNS) are setting a new standard for circular…

10.30

Design IndabaBobo A period companion designed to help young girls track their period health. Bobo, a tactile and interactive companion device, designed by Anoushka Sawardekar as part of her master’s thesis project at…

10.29

Design IndabaThe Whispers of Plants The Electric Plant Co is using technology to better understand and respond to nature. The Electric Plant Co.

10.29

Design IndabaFinally, Something Good Stefan Sagmeister turns shoes into wearable data visualisations for his exhibition at Paris’s Gaîté Lyrique 'Finally, Something Good’ , Stefan Sagmeister’s exhibition at Paris’s Gaîté Lyrique…

10.23

Design IndabaAnemoSwab A James Dyson award winning low-cost, 3D Printed device to test for respiratory infections AnemoSwab, an innovation designed by Yonatan Morocz, a McGill University researcher is a tiny, low cost…

10.22

Design IndabaThe Harvest Season Ibrahim Mahama reimagines cultural possibilities Acclaimed Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama transforms the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris into a space for confronting history and…

10.21

Design IndabaTrain Jazz Joshua Wolk puts creates music from the New York’s subway transit

10.16

Design IndabaAfter the Last Sip Designers Chao-Chun Kung, Ching-Yu Lin and Chen-Yang Chang turn coffee grounds into interior design elements After the Last Sip, a featured exhibition at London Design Festival 2026, explores…

10.16

Design IndabaReefvive A James Dyson Award Winner 2026, Reefvive is Using Marine Waste to promote Coral Reef Restoration Reefvive is a modular coral restoration system that transforms waste coral gravel and oyster shells…

10.16

Design IndabaEarly Lab EarlyHealth launches Early Lab home kits for early detection and screenings. Co-founded by Thomas Heatherwick, D-J Collins, EarlyHealth is a company working towards providing people with in-home…

10.02

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