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 ‘Wolverine’ DualSense controller so feral it makes the actual game look tame

September 27

I distinctly remember the Wolverine game hype. It’s quite literally why I bought a PS5… well, that and GTA VI.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

A ‘Wolverine’ DualSense controller so feral it makes the actual game look tame

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

DIY AirPower desk charges your phone anywhere on its glass top, also reminds you to drink water Yanko Design

A Reoriented Stair and a Glass-Walled Dining Room Just Fixed This House’s Worst Flaw Yanko Design

The Aluminum Pen That Actually Lets You See What You’re Drawing Yanko Design

Standard Earplugs Dig In or Fall Out, Ears 360 Silence Does Neither Yanko Design

9 Fall Camping Gadgets That Actually Earn Their Pack Weight in September 2026 Yanko Design

Uplay Fits the Gaming Body the Way a Cycling Saddle Fits a Rider Yanko Design