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

Fast Company Design

Canva’s big layoffs say a lot about the AI design landscape

11.04

The AI design giant Canva just announced the first-ever major round of layoffs in its 13-year history.

AI in design

Read at Fast Company Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Canva’s big layoffs say a lot about the AI design landscape

Related

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

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

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

AI Design: Conversational Video by Tavus Abduzeedo

Student Project | AI Fungi and Residual Ground World Landscape Architecture

In the Age of AI, Curiosity Is Our Greatest Creative Tool PRINT