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

Dezeen

AI-powered alarm for deaf people wins UK James Dyson Award

September 15

Design student Gargi Agrawalla has won this year's UK James Dyson Award with a device that uses artificial intelligence to alert deaf and hard-of-hearing users of important sounds like knocks or fire…

AI in design

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

AI-powered alarm for deaf people wins UK James Dyson Award

Related

Autodesk’s AI assistant could radically change how buildings are designed and built Fast Company Design

Digital Camouflage Design Indaba

IA creates Craftsman-style office for AI company Notion in San Francisco Dezeen Interiors

Topo portable lamp by Felix Pöttinger Design Studio for Maytoni Dezeen

Jony Ive decorates Moncler outerwear collection with New York symbols Dezeen

Resincode tile collection by VitrA Tiles Dezeen