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

V&A Blog

New Work: The Long Goodbye by Carrie Mae Weems

October 1

V&A East Museum New Work commission, The Long Goodbye, by artist Carrie Mae Weems part of the ‘Why We Make’ galleries during a first look at the new V&A East Museum in Queen Elizabeth Olympic...

New Work V&A East

Read at V&A Blog ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

New Work: The Long Goodbye by Carrie Mae Weems

More from V&A Blog on Hakken

A way of looking: our first encounter with the Cochin Ceiling V&A Blog

Lost Music Venues – On the road V&A Blog

Lost Music Venues – Before the phones came out: how gig photography created the myth of live music V&A Blog

V&A statement regarding Industrial Action at South Kensington, 25 and 26 September 2026 V&A Blog

Digital Design Weekend returns to V&A South Kensington this September V&A Blog