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

Yanko Design

Meet the electric beach wagon with smart assist, remote control, and underglow

October 12

I have a theory that the beach wagon was invented by someone who never actually took one to the beach.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Meet the electric beach wagon with smart assist, remote control, and underglow

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

8 Japanese Stationery That Make US Back-to-School Supplies Look Boring Yanko Design

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum looks like it was carved by water instead of architects Yanko Design

Your Small Room Secretly Needs Fewer Lamps, Not More Yanko Design

This Kid-Friendly Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Teaches Children How To Build Chatbots Yanko Design

Anbernic RG DDS brings 3DS-inspired design and Snapdragon power to dual-screen gaming Yanko Design

How Iron Man’s arc reactor works, explained part by part Yanko Design