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

SOOOT Box Prototype Turns Punched Paper Cards Into Audio Controls

10.29

Starting a podcast shouldn’t require navigating past messages, notifications, and whatever else your phone has decided needs attention.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

SOOOT Box Prototype Turns Punched Paper Cards Into Audio Controls

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

PlayStation 5 Prism Collection revives the nostalgia of see-through designs in a modern interpretation Yanko Design

A Tiny Japanese Pavilion Has Hidden Benches and Twig Locks Yanko Design

Arctic Fox’s Super Mouse Doubles as a Touchscreen Control Console Yanko Design

5 Halloween-Inspired Designs to Get You Into the Spooky Spirit Yanko Design

Flashback One75: Film-Camera Rituals Without the Film Bills Yanko Design

XREAL AURA Glasses Put the Battery in Your Pocket, Not on Your Face Yanko Design