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

Yanko Design

Flying Traffic Cone concept transforms into a Drone to auto-assemble itself on roads

11.02

The traffic cone is basically a Rorschach test for the internet generation. Construction workers see a long night shift, college kids see dorm decor, and anyone who’s ever downloaded a movie sees…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Flying Traffic Cone concept transforms into a Drone to auto-assemble itself on roads

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Nike and LEGO’s new space-themed sneakers let kids take their basketball style beyond Earth Yanko Design

Board’s Tabletop Console Uses Toy Spoons and Spaceships Instead of Gamepads Yanko Design

Hero Keyboard Packs a Windows 11 PC and Borrows Your Tablet’s Screen Yanko Design

Assouline turns classic board games into luxury interior objects with The Game Room Collection Yanko Design

Infinix Debuts First Global Flagship Store in Bali, Blending Tech, Coffee, and Creativity Yanko Design

FOLDBOOK Is a Wearable Sketchbook Without Permanent Binding Yanko Design