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

Surface

MacDowell Honors Sade Lythcott and Tina Roth Eisenberg at Its Annual National Benefit

10.27

At Gotham Hall in New York City, MacDowell turned its annual National Benefit into a celebration of two leaders whose influence has reached beyond their own institutions.

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

MacDowell Honors Sade Lythcott and Tina Roth Eisenberg at Its Annual National Benefit

More from Surface on Hakken

Chasing Thousandths of a Second with Max Verstappen Surface

Cafe Charmant Gives the Classic Brasserie a Sense of Humor Surface

Ken Goldberg Brings The Outside World Indoors Surface

Cristina Moreno of Ōmbia Studio Debuts El Dorado Surface

Monet’s Iris Sells For $56.2 Million, Setting France’s All-Time Auction Record, and Other News. Surface

Massimo Dutti Unveils Steven Sebring’s Unseen Portraits of Patti Smith in New York Surface