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 Interiors

Manual's camera shop in New York is imbued with "philosophy of skate shop"

10.27

Design-build studio Protean Practice and camera company Manual have collaborated on the brand's first storefront and photo lab, outfitting a Chinatown shop with plywood seating, metallic finishes and…

Read at Dezeen Interiors ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Manual's camera shop in New York is imbued with "philosophy of skate shop"

More from Dezeen Interiors on Hakken

OHLAB experiments with colour-blocking and cork in old and new buildings of Terreno Barrio Hotel in Mallorca Dezeen Interiors

MVRDV designs Essen Central Library as public "living room" in Germany Dezeen Interiors

Ste Marie imbues Monos Vancouver office with "residential quality" Dezeen Interiors

Shanghai tea shop Basao draws on "Rockbund’s historic buildings" Dezeen Interiors

Box 9 used “brick on every surface” in Soho restaurant Kid Dezeen Interiors

NM3 designs "truly classic bar for Milan" Dezeen Interiors