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

HP’s $699 OmniBook 5 Has the One Thing the MacBook Neo Doesn’t

October 2

Affordable laptops often make you choose between a nice screen and a machine you’d want to carry. HP’s $699.99 OmniBook 5 14 makes a different pitch against Apple’s MacBook Neo: an OLED touchscreen…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

HP’s $699 OmniBook 5 Has the One Thing the MacBook Neo Doesn’t

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Google’s Fix for One-Handed Typing Is a Rolling Belt of Letters Yanko Design

The VIVIFoCAL S1 Glasses Focus Themselves So Your Eyes Don’t Have To Yanko Design

Designers Already Prototype Hardware – Now They’re Prototyping Demand Too Yanko Design

London’s Coolest Capsule Hotel Proves Budget and Beautiful Aren’t Opposites Yanko Design

The 1969 Lamp Nobody Knew They Needed Is Back Yanko Design

Nobody Expected a Dumpster to Be the Coolest Bag Yanko Design