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

Yellowtrace

Madeleine Castaing Meets Manhattan: Inside Child Studio’s New York Debut.

October 1

Before Alexy Kos and Che Huang touched a single length of velvet, they were thinking about Madeleine Castaing’s midnight blue and leopard print, and Renzo Mongiardino’s tented 1960s salons.

Read at Yellowtrace ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Madeleine Castaing Meets Manhattan: Inside Child Studio’s New York Debut.

More from Yellowtrace on Hakken

Farrell Wray Architects Build a Concrete Gallery Around a Tree They Refused to Touch. Yellowtrace

Ellison Studios Gives The Least Public Room In The House Its Best Furniture Yet. Yellowtrace

Ciguë Designs Satisfy’s First Store as Two Mirroring Spaces in Paris. Yellowtrace

The Bonobo Trades Coastal Cliché for Brazilian Modernism Inside a Brutalist Byron Bay Shell. Yellowtrace

Jardan’s Collection Built Around Australian Summers, Long Lunches and Evenings That Linger. Yellowtrace

Wildcoast by Studio Kennon Builds for Bass Strait’s Wind, Rain and Salt. Yellowtrace