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

Core77

A Minimalist Wheeled Stool That Doesn't Look Like a Wheeled Stool

September 20

This Allround stool is by industrial designer Hirotaka Tako. It comes with a little surprise: Casters hidden beneath the base. There's also a taller version with a third disc to act as a footrest.

Minimal & restrained Furniture Design|Furniture-Design

Read at Core77 ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

A Minimalist Wheeled Stool That Doesn't Look Like a Wheeled Stool

Related

‘minimalism feels cold when empty of narrative’: how aarke shapes its brand identity Designboom

RCA design students exercise restraint in One Tool One Stool exhibition Dezeen

Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-14-26 to 9-18-26) Core77

A 1973 Fiat Pickup Truck Core77

From Hexagon to Hive: Designing Play Through the Geometry of Bees Core77

Pedestal's Power Strip Accessories Core77