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

BP&O

Studio Blackburn’s new identity for folding bike icon Brompton cements the brand’s place in British engineering heritage

August 20

Pretty much the one and only memorable brand name when it comes to bikes you can fold up and carry around, Brompton – as its thoroughly British name might suggest – was founded in England in 1975 by…

Heritage & nostalgia Rebrand / refresh

Read at BP&O ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Studio Blackburn’s new identity for folding bike icon Brompton cements the brand’s place in British engineering heritage

Related

JapanFrom Abandoned Building to Artistic Landmark, The Revival of Oya Grand Center Pen

Cozy flat with a vintage kitchen and a window seat Coco Lapine Design

A Home Filled with Art, Vintage Finds and Heart My Scandinavian Home

Ceramic “burlwood,” vintage nightclub chairs, bronze reliefs, and more from Lisbon Design Week Sight Unseen

JapanPrism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010 Shift Japan