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 Archive

Yanko Design

A $20 Magnetic Pen That’s Actually a Useful Stocking Stuffer

11.02

Buying a notebook for a notebook person is a surprisingly delicate holiday assignment. The cover might be gorgeous, but the pages could have the wrong ruling, the binding might not open the way they…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

A $20 Magnetic Pen That’s Actually a Useful Stocking Stuffer

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Origen’s Ceramic Pet Bowl Looks at Home Without the Paw Prints Yanko Design

DIY Mod Makes The Apple Logo Glow On (Some) Existing MacBooks Yanko Design

A Candy-Colored House With Giant Arches Is Turning Heads on a London Street Yanko Design

This yellow Lamborghini concept has more LEDs than your gaming PC Yanko Design

The iPhone Air 2 might come with a Pixel-shaped camera bump and dual lenses Yanko Design

This award-winning yarn packaging looks good enough to lick (please don’t) Yanko Design