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

Azure

Nature As Infrastructure: Investing in Nature Enables Design for a Resilient Future

10.20

We are all familiar with grey infrastructure: the engineered “concrete” infrastructure of our cities, including roads, bridges, sewers, pipelines and rails.

Read at Azure ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Nature As Infrastructure: Investing in Nature Enables Design for a Resilient Future

More from Azure on Hakken

At Its Q9 Launch, Audi Showcases the Consequence of Ideals Azure

Keilhauer’s Modular Seating Systems Turn Architectural Leftovers into Compelling Workspaces Azure

Oslo’s New Government Quarter Reclaims a Site of Terror Through Architecture Azure

Patricia Urquiola Made a Serious Splash at NeoCon 2026 Azure

In a Converted Garage, a Parisian Home With Space-Age Flair Azure

12 Standouts from IDS Vancouver 2026 and the Design Vancouver Festival Azure