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

Good Design Australia

Murray Hunter – 2026 Australian Design Prize

October 14

THE AUSTRALIAN DESIGN PRIZE WAS ESTABLISHED TO RECOGNISE INDIVIDUAL DESIGNERS WHO ARE MAKING, OR HAVE MADE, A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT IN AUSTRALIAN DESIGN OVER THE COURSE OF THEIR CAREER.

Awards

Read at Good Design Australia ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Murray Hunter – 2026 Australian Design Prize

More from Good Design Australia on Hakken

Bonnie Shaw – 2026 Women in Design Award Good Design Australia

Outerspace – 2026 Good Design Team of the Year Good Design Australia

SolShare 2026 Award of the Year + Sustainability Award Good Design Australia

2026 Winners Announced Good Design Australia

Good Design Week 2026 Good Design Australia

2026 Judging Wrapped: Jury Reflections Good Design Australia