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

GELATO Glass Candle Holder Keeps Its Swirl While the Candle Melts

October 13

Soft-serve ice cream rarely keeps its perfect swirl for long, which is part of the appeal and occasionally a problem for your shirt.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

GELATO Glass Candle Holder Keeps Its Swirl While the Candle Melts

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Freitag’s Luxury Bags Reuse Truck Tarps Without Hiding Wear Yanko Design

Google Fitbit Edge lets an aging battery be replaced instead of the tracker Yanko Design

Tilta’s modular iPhone case lets you swap a card holder for a kickstand Yanko Design

KUXIU D5 Charges 3 Devices Without Taking Over Your Desk Yanko Design

This 9-in-1 folding titanium ruler can draw circles, slice paper, and eject your SIM card Yanko Design

Redmi just debuted an ultra-affordable $42 monitor arm that hides your cables too Yanko Design