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

Herman Miller updates Aeron Chair to ensure its "lasting design"

September 14

Promotion: American furniture design brand Herman Miller has been honing its Aeron office chair for decades, equipping it with innovative materials and features for modern workplaces.

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Herman Miller updates Aeron Chair to ensure its "lasting design"

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Design Academy Eindhoven students reinvent the bathroom for a resource-scarce future Dezeen

Vipp453 Swivel chair by Vipp Dezeen

"Is touching really asking too much?" Dezeen

London design "an international success story" says Sadiq Khan Dezeen

HS2 excavations used to create biscuit-like tiles for Old Oak Common station Dezeen

Four products that Dyson successfully revolutionised, and four it didn't Dezeen