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

Dezeen

Dezeen launches "richer and more versatile" new website

10.21

Dezeen has updated its website for the first time in 10 years. Dezeen's co-CEOs Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li explain the changes.

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Dezeen launches "richer and more versatile" new website

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Apple showcases upcycled found furniture and banana palm-paper lantern at Designers of Tomorrow show Dezeen

Design Academy Eindhoven students protest overcrowded facilities Dezeen

Karimoku New Standard and ASICS create furniture made from crushed trainers Dezeen

Baird Architects releases first furniture collection as "natural extension" of studio Dezeen

Tesla launches flying Roadster concept car Dezeen

Apple consolidates smart-home capabilities in HomeView dashboard Dezeen