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

Design Milk

Freitag Turns Used Truck Tarps Into a New Kind of Luxury

October 9

When talking about luxury fashion, there are certain conventions that consumers have come to expect: sumptuous materials, opulent detailing, and conceptual—if not impractical—design.

Read at Design Milk ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Freitag Turns Used Truck Tarps Into a New Kind of Luxury

More from Design Milk on Hakken

Friday Five with Veronica Mishaan: Inside the Making of a Bogotá Penthouse Design Milk

Behind the Swoosh: 50 Years of Nike Design Design Milk

Eichholtz California Expands Its West Coast Footprint Design Milk

Thea Djordjadze Explores the Space Between Art and Architecture Design Milk

A Modern Japanese Steakhouse Drenched in Denim Hues Design Milk

Preciosa’s Signature Designs Offer Designers Untapped Creative Freedom Design Milk