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

Azure

As Celine Dion Returns to Paris, The City’s Design Week Matches Her Risk-Taking Style

September 22

Arriving in Paris for the city’s September design week (anchored by the fall edition of the Maison&Objet fair), I had not initially realized that my trip was overlapping with another, even more…

Read at Azure ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

As Celine Dion Returns to Paris, The City’s Design Week Matches Her Risk-Taking Style

More from Azure on Hakken

A Spanish Seed Company’s Workspace Is Designed for the Changing Seasons Azure

In Czechia, A New Arena Acts as an Urban Connector Azure

“Leading With Landscape” Charts 25 City-Shaping Years of Waterfront Toronto Azure

At TIFF, “Bunker” Charts the Moral Struggles of a Modern Starchitect Azure

Bota Bota’s Expansion Turns the Sauna From a Solitary Ritual Into a Social One Azure

Dacor Blurs the Line Between Kitchen and Living Space Azure