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

Designing Delicious: Le Grand Café

10.19

Image by Sofiane Ryan Jabeur "This building was supposed to be temporary," says Alexandre Rossoz, managing director of Loulou Groupe.

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Designing Delicious: Le Grand Café

More from Surface on Hakken

Achille Salvagni Brings a World Shaped by Water and Wind to M/Y HEED Surface

Snarkitecture Designs a Portal into Bowmore’s Captivo Collection Surface

Ginori 1735 Conjured a Playfully Arcane Gathering for Its New ‘Fortunae’ Collection Surface

Yohji Yamamoto and Danh Võ Named Noguchi Award Recipients, and Other News. Surface

Luís and Tiago Rebelo de Andrade on Shaping Some of Portugal’s Most Recognizable Spaces Surface

Inside Seiko’s “The Gift of Time” Exhibition with Kengo Kuma Surface