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

Five innovative and practical modular furniture designs

October 4

Our latest roundup looks at modular furniture pieces that are both practical and surprising, ranging from an alternative to bespoke cabinetry to a furniture system made up of squishy balls.

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Five innovative and practical modular furniture designs

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Space Popular creates carpet-covered gallery for Nieuwe Instituut Dezeen

Rafael Prieto creates furniture from fragments of New York buildings Dezeen

Nothing wants to revolutionise the takeaway paper cup Dezeen

Vollebak creates Rock Jacket from 54,000 slate tiles Dezeen

We're scared of Meta's adorable AI device Dezeen

San Francisco exhibition explores the "radical imagination" of Rael San Fratello Dezeen