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

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DesigningJapan

触れる、手放す、また飛び込む。“楽しさ”を更新し続けるために──デザイナー・相樂園香

March 3

境界を越え、構造をも動かす。デザインの役割は意匠や体験に限らない。事業推進、組織、経営......その価値発揮が期待される範囲は広がり続けている。では、その実務家たちはいかにして形作られるのか。連載「Unbound Design Leadership」では、専門領域の境界を越え、価値を創出する、実践者にフォーカス。

Read at Designing ↗

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触れる、手放す、また飛び込む。“楽しさ”を更新し続けるために──デザイナー・相樂園香

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