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

Creative Boom

Joseph Clark on why he's keeping AI out of Oh Studio, and the protest film that went viral saying so

September 28

The animation director behind this summer's viral We Are Better Than This film says AI has nothing to offer his work. And he's built a remote studio to prove his point.

AI in design State of Play

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Joseph Clark on why he's keeping AI out of Oh Studio, and the protest film that went viral saying so

Related

Beauty brands were writing slop before AI: here's how Uncommon won a D&AD Black Pencil for calling it out Creative Boom

Booms & Shakes: September's biggest hires, bold bets on AI, and design overtakes retail Creative Boom

Decision paralysis, lost conviction and no juniors: what brand creative leaders say AI is exposing Creative Boom

"We have the kind of stuff AI wishes it could make": Why trust is more important than ever for the NASA brand Creative Bloq

Meta debuts Tamagotchi-style AI agent Dezeen

Meta unveils lightweight VR glasses and camera-free AI glasses at Connect 2026 Dezeen