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

Surface

Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and M+ Unite on Exhibitions, Research and Conservation, and Other News.

11.02

Plus, Moncler executive Adrian Ward-Rees to lead Dries Van Noten, and Dallas Art Fair relocates to Southern Methodist University in 2027 Photo Credit: Chau-Cuong Le / Hans Lucas / Agence Caroline…

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and M+ Unite on Exhibitions, Research and Conservation, and Other News.

More from Surface on Hakken

Josh Safdie joins Dan Nadel for an IFPDA Foundation Conversation at Christie’s Surface

Izumi Kato Brings His Childhood Pastime to Perrotin New York Surface

Team’s Visual Identity for “Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party” Surface

The Inheritance of Checo Pérez: Building Cadillac Formula 1 From Year One Surface

Designer of the Day: Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge of Sunfish Surface

Liv Vaisberg on Collectible New York’s Third Edition Surface