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

Fast Company Design

Having ‘good taste’ won’t save designers

September 21

“Taste will be the key differentiator.” “Taste is what AI can’t replace.” “Taste is our competitive advantage.” Have you heard these as many times as I have over the last year?

Read at Fast Company Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Having ‘good taste’ won’t save designers

More from Fast Company Design on Hakken

Swedish candy darling BonBon is entering its big-box era Fast Company Design

The next phase of design will still be human-led Fast Company Design

Think you can design a better iPhone? Here’s your chance Fast Company Design

New York Fashion Week recap: from Ralph Lauren to Eckhaus Latta, joyful dressing takes over for Spring 2027 Fast Company Design

What the new rules of luxury can teach every brand Fast Company Design

Experts say Trump ballroom interiors represent ‘historic monarchies’ over American ideals Fast Company Design