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

RIMOWA’s 2 New Colors Quietly Solve the Baggage Claim Problem

October 8

At baggage claim, a good suitcase can have one frustrating flaw: it looks like everyone else’s. Rows of black and gray cases roll past, and the bag you chose for its clean design becomes surprisingly…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

RIMOWA’s 2 New Colors Quietly Solve the Baggage Claim Problem

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

A $249 Smart Lock That Still Opens When You’ve Forgotten to Charge It Yanko Design

This $175 Wii-style Smart paddle turns your TV into a pickleball court Yanko Design

Apple’s iPhone 18 is getting a ‘cheaper’ A20 chip to keep the overall phone affordable Yanko Design

This $20 Thank-You Card Just Solved Saying Thanks Without Overcomplicating It Yanko Design

A Pen Holder That Actually Looks Like Desk Art Yanko Design

Two Bedrooms, Two Bathrooms, and a 700-Square-Foot Tiny Home That Doesn’t Feel Tiny Yanko Design