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

Eight architecture and design events in November from Dezeen Events Guide

11.02

Miami art week , Design Doha Biennial , Dubai Design Week and the Dezeen Awards 2026 party are among the key architecture, design and art events featured in Dezeen Events Guide this November.

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Eight architecture and design events in November from Dezeen Events Guide

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Dezeen's favourite furniture and homeware from October Dezeen

Scrapped marine rope recast as stools that rock like buoys Dezeen

Ten products that upgrade office interiors Dezeen

"Lady in Blue is as fitting a monument to our era as any I can imagine" Dezeen

Get featured in Dezeen's digital guide to Miami art week 2026 Dezeen

Montana acquires sustainable furniture maker Takt Dezeen