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

Hommeboys Interiors Brings Warmth to a Los Altos Hills Home

10.19

An exclusive semi-rural enclave in California, Los Altos Hills is known for its dense woodlands, rolling hills, and stunning panoramic views.

Read at Design Milk ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Hommeboys Interiors Brings Warmth to a Los Altos Hills Home

More from Design Milk on Hakken

From Spotlight to Soft-light: New Lighting by Coil + Drift Design Milk

A 1908 Japanese Prison Finds New Life as a Luxury Hotel Design Milk

Alfonso Verduzco Translates Mexican Architecture Into ALMA Acoustic Panels Design Milk

262 Fifth Avenue Pairs Sculptural Architecture With Serene Interiors Design Milk

Amazon Rethinks the Kindle From the Inside Out Design Milk

A New Book Preserves the Lost Interiors of Ebony and Jet’s Chicago Headquarters Design Milk