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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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

An Oregon Parking Lot Was Transformed Into a Forest-Inspired Library

11.07

At East County Library in Gresham, Oregon, timber columns rise through gaps in the acoustic ceiling, keeping the structure visually separate from the surfaces around it.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

An Oregon Parking Lot Was Transformed Into a Forest-Inspired Library

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

This fan-made LEGO McDonald’s combo comes with everything except the McFlurry Yanko Design

Story mfg.’s Plaid ASICS Go Outdoors Without the Tactical Look Yanko Design

Tesla is ending Cybertruck production in Texas, hinting at discontinuing the model entirely Yanko Design

Midea’s award-winning blender concept can both heat and cool your mixture down Yanko Design

The Nubeo Ecliptic watch puts a tiny spacecraft control panel on your wrist Yanko Design

Raven Prism Smart Glasses Put a Linux Computer in the Corner of Your Eye Yanko Design