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

The Mindcraft Project showcases works that "lie in-between craft and design"

September 24

The latest edition of Danish design initiative The Mindcraft Project , curated by Christian + Jade, features pieces ranging from a pedestal constructed out of leftover shipping industry steel to a…

Craft & material

Read at Dezeen ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

The Mindcraft Project showcases works that "lie in-between craft and design"

Related

Kiss Branding crafts mature new identity for enterprise AI platform AutogenAI Design Week

Sara Soskolne is a typeface designer who thinks of herself as a craftsperson Design Observer

Packaging Design: Stereoscope Coffee by OlssønBarbieri Abduzeedo

Japan「WELL-MADE クラフト感ある、秋と冬のマスターピース。」編集後記：秋冬版のWELL-MADE特集ができあがりました BRUTUS

“I like to draw pretty things”: Lia Sued C. on trading too much screen-time for tactile illustrations It's Nice That

Ester Pazur on being a 'pessimist', the power of stop-motion and why handmade art still matters Creative Boom