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

OnePlus wants to stick a tiny air conditioner on the back of its gaming phone

October 9

Apple’s MagSafe, which returned on the iPhone 12 in 2020, turned the back of the phone into prime real estate.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

OnePlus wants to stick a tiny air conditioner on the back of its gaming phone

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Wild Land PickupMate Trunk turns your pickup into two-story camping space at the push of a button Yanko Design

This plastic stool is a giant Esc key, and it hides your clutter Yanko Design

Atari Made a $219 Retro Console You Can Actually Write Programs On Yanko Design

3 Lamps Built From Objects Nobody Wanted Anymore Yanko Design

Retro Song Bird Is the Record Player Game Boy Cartridges Deserved Yanko Design

This $1,500 Korean Chair Is Built More Like a House Than a Couch Yanko Design