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

Kanaisasaki is formed from in-house designers who have made a career out of staying curious

October 13

Aki Kanai and Taku Sasaki have worked at the same Japanese stationery giant for 17 years – balancing their corporate work with an independent practice spanning identity, products, exhibitions and…

Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Kanaisasaki is formed from in-house designers who have made a career out of staying curious

More from Creative Boom on Hakken

'The experience of seeing the work is pretty particular': Lily Bunney on her detailed paintings filled with grids and pixels Creative Boom

Britain's oldest running team has a combined age of 321, and Rankin shot their portraits Creative Boom

Is this the most intense art experience in the world? Creative Boom

Louise Laborie draws the lonely, cinematic and in-between parts of America Creative Boom

Simji Park creates soft, dreamy and tonal illustrations inspired by nature Creative Boom

NB Studio's Alan Dye on 29 years, starting again and why design needs more joy Creative Boom