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

Dezeen

San Francisco exhibition explores the "radical imagination" of Rael San Fratello

October 1

A structure made of bio-based thermoplastic and recycled broom heads is among the works featured in a mid-career retrospective of design studio Rael San Fratello at San Francisco 's Yerba Buena…

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

San Francisco exhibition explores the "radical imagination" of Rael San Fratello

More from Dezeen on Hakken

Our Planet carpet collection by Gensler and Ege Carpets Dezeen

Dezeen's favourite furniture and lighting from September Dezeen

Eight architecture and design events in October from Dezeen Events Guide Dezeen

Freckle phone aims to send kids outside to play and engage with the world Dezeen

Synthetic memories feature in MoMA information design exhibition Dezeen

Camelot seating system by Antonio Citterio for Flexform Dezeen