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

Colossal

Meet the Lap Easel, a Portable Companion for Taking Creativity Anywhere

October 13

From birch plywood and select solid maple, birch, cherry, and other native hardwoods, Chicago maker and designer Bill Groot crafts handmade Lap Easels in small batches.

Craft & material

Read at Colossal ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Meet the Lap Easel, a Portable Companion for Taking Creativity Anywhere

Related

Noe Kuremoto reconciles contemporary craft with Japan’s ancestral mythology Wallpaper*

Japan繭山龍泉堂「AN EXHIBITION OF SONG CERAMICS 2026 宋磁」約120点の宋磁を一堂に展示・販売 AXIS

Inside the Craft of Skin First: Rebrand & Packaging by Uoi Studio Abduzeedo

Spredges, glitter, and lots of gold foil: Penguin is betting on deluxe book design to win over kids Fast Company Design

Inside the Craft of Roster: Branding Design by BOND Abduzeedo

How Plau Design Reimagined Type Design for Grecotipo Abduzeedo

Latest

Meet the Lap Easel, a Portable Companion for Taking Creativity Anywhere

Related

Noe Kuremoto reconciles contemporary craft with Japan’s ancestral mythology Wallpaper*

Japan繭山龍泉堂「AN EXHIBITION OF SONG CERAMICS 2026 宋磁」 約120点の宋磁を一堂に展示・販売 AXIS

Inside the Craft of Skin First: Rebrand & Packaging by Uoi Studio Abduzeedo

Spredges, glitter, and lots of gold foil: Penguin is betting on deluxe book design to win over kids Fast Company Design

Inside the Craft of Roster: Branding Design by BOND Abduzeedo

How Plau Design Reimagined Type Design for Grecotipo Abduzeedo

Japan繭山龍泉堂「AN EXHIBITION OF SONG CERAMICS 2026 宋磁」約120点の宋磁を一堂に展示・販売 AXIS