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

Alter design exhibition returns to Tokyo with AI-powered tea ceremony and washi paper furniture

11.04

The second edition of young designers' exhibition Alter has opened in central Tokyo , featuring a glowing lung-like lamp and Japanese cedar stools made from every part of the log.

Craft & material AI in design Japan-inspired

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Alter design exhibition returns to Tokyo with AI-powered tea ceremony and washi paper furniture

Related

As AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads Fast Company Design

Traditional Craft Industry Promotion Association, 1975 Logo Histories

AI personas and 3D instruments give trading broker Axi a local face Mindsparkle Mag

"Direct and unrefined" materials create tactile interior at Jeju restaurant by &Daughters Dezeen Interiors

Grace Atelier: Three stone inspirations, one design language by Ceramiche Keope DesignWanted

AI Design: Conversational Video by Tavus Abduzeedo