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

Creative Review

Cricket Wireless turns voicemails into one-off vinyl records

10.21

US mobile service provider Cricket Wireless has turned people’s saved voicemails into bespoke vinyl records, in an activation developed with San Francisco-based creative agency Argonaut that makes a…

Read at Creative Review ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Cricket Wireless turns voicemails into one-off vinyl records

More from Creative Review on Hakken

The Conversation: How creativity can counter greenwashing Creative Review

Anime and the future of creativity Creative Review

Digital bank Kuda targets young Nigerians with new rebrand Creative Review

CrazyGames stakes its claim in the ‘web rush’ with bold rebrand Creative Review

New book celebrates the lost graphics of holiday brochures Creative Review

Cinematic campaign tackles railway suicides in the Netherlands Creative Review