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

Inaugural Walker Design Triennial features flesh-like speakers and post-apocalyptic scenes

11.04

A set of speakers with flesh-like exteriors was among the conceptual design work shown at the first Walker Design Triennial in Minneapolis, USA, which curator Joseph Grima said reflected on the…

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Inaugural Walker Design Triennial features flesh-like speakers and post-apocalyptic scenes

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Alter design exhibition returns to Tokyo with AI-powered tea ceremony and washi paper furniture Dezeen

SCAD alumni transform 18th-century staircase into colourful installation during Design Miami Paris Dezeen

Tatiana Bilbao creates rammed-earth installation at Art Omi Dezeen

Yinka Ilori reveals Tottenham Hotspur away shirt Dezeen

Sabine Marcelis takes a moment to reflect in first museum exhibition Dezeen

John Tree forms sculptural Hoop lamp from pine for Vaarni Dezeen