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

The Dieline

Centers’s Latest Project Offers a ‘Riff’ On Box Meals

September 18

Co-created by Michelin-star chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, Riff promises to combine fine-dining ingredients like organic pasta, curated and crafted spices, and signature toppers into a…

Read at The Dieline ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Centers’s Latest Project Offers a ‘Riff’ On Box Meals

More from The Dieline on Hakken

Entering five projects or more? Every entry drops 10%. Ten or more and it is 20%. The Dieline

Freda Gu’s Aesop Concept ‘Eidesis’ Reflects the Myth of Narcissus in Every Fold The Dieline

Belcanto Gives Italian Wine Something to Sing About The Dieline

Boreal Points North Through Stone and Scent The Dieline

Aara Turns the Spice Jar Into an Invitation to Indian Cuisine The Dieline

Chroma by Corpus Makes a Sleek Statement for Target Beauty Studio with a Color-Forward System The Dieline