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

Creative Boom

Sam Nicklin turns eBay finds into small, funny worlds

October 6

The Nottingham-born photographer and director builds still lifes from a colour, an object and a good joke – with subjects including a watch squeezed into a stack of onion rings and a crocodile that…

Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Sam Nicklin turns eBay finds into small, funny worlds

More from Creative Boom on Hakken

Tamura Ikuho on skipping agency work and diving straight into freelance graphic design Creative Boom

Philip Lindeman builds a slightly haunted Sofia of night shops and stray cats in less than two weeks Creative Boom

Fjällräven bets on the handmade with giant stitched banners by Miscellaneous Adventures Creative Boom

Elizabeth Saloka paints groceries and gadgets onto rocks – yep, rocks Creative Boom

Ana Popescu's idyllic illustrations remind us of the warm summer months that have just passed us by Creative Boom

Fried-egg teapots, tufted roll cakes and Moroccan landscapes feature in Myriam Lemon's creations Creative Boom