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

Nike Actually Made Sneakers That Look Like Grandma’s Couch

October 5

I lived in an era and a culture where our couches’ designs were pretty maximalist and contained a gazillion details.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Nike Actually Made Sneakers That Look Like Grandma’s Couch

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Flat-Pack Furniture That Actually Survives Your Next Move Yanko Design

MERACH’s new W60 Plus walking pad boasts 12 incline levels, RGB lights, and a built-in Bluetooth speaker Yanko Design

This Expandable LEGO Frame System Finally Solves the Collector Storage Nightmare Yanko Design

After 15 Years, Patek Philippe Returns With a Hand-Wound Chronograph That Stores Energy Like a Bow Yanko Design

Hilariously Practical USB-C Cable Looks Exactly Like a Construction-Site Extension Cord Yanko Design

This 20-Foot Tiny Home on Wheels Proves Better Design Beats More Square Footage Yanko Design