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

Scriben AI Ballpoint Pen Refuses To Act Like Other ‘Unnecessary’ AI Devices

10.31

Tech companies love inventing new objects for you to carry around. Smart glasses, AI pins, little pucks you clip to your shirt that light up when they’re listening.

AI in design

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Scriben AI Ballpoint Pen Refuses To Act Like Other ‘Unnecessary’ AI Devices

Related

In the Age of AI, Curiosity Is Our Greatest Creative Tool PRINT

As AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads Fast Company Design

Imogen: Agentic AI Mindsparkle Mag

These people are cutting the clutter and redesigning their smart TVs with AI Fast Company Design

JapanハートコアがCMSを刷新、AIへの自然言語指示でコンテンツの下書き作成や運用に対応 Web Designing

UC Berkeley’s new AI-research building is designed for human interaction Fast Company Design