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

Visual Atelier 8

Atelier Sérgio Rebelo shapes winery around the Douro Valley landscape

10.23

Atelier Sérgio Rebelo combines curved timber architecture with gravity-fed winemaking Architecture studio Atelier Sérgio Rebelo has designed Quinta de Adorigo Winery in Tabuaço, Portugal, a…

Read at Visual Atelier 8 ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Atelier Sérgio Rebelo shapes winery around the Douro Valley landscape

More from Visual Atelier 8 on Hakken

Us By Night closes its Antwerp chapter after a decade of creativity Visual Atelier 8

Alice Diop creates multimedia installation for Miu Miu at Art Basel Paris Visual Atelier 8

Pedestal questions emotional attachment in new film ‘Objects of Desire’ Visual Atelier 8

GENER8ION brings 12-metre audiovisual installation to Grand Palais in Paris Visual Atelier 8

HKS Hospitality draws on Red Sea cliffs for AMAALA Yacht Club Visual Atelier 8

VOID marks 189 minutes of history with light installation in Oslo Visual Atelier 8