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

This 3D-printed film camera can manipulate perspective for perfect skyscraper shots

10.18

Point your phone at a tall building and snap a photo, then look at it. The whole thing is leaning back like it’s trying to dodge a punch, and that effect has a name: converging verticals.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This 3D-printed film camera can manipulate perspective for perfect skyscraper shots

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Lego’s 5,682-brick Venice set has canals, a clocktower, and a tiny piano that actually plays Yanko Design

A 120-Square-Foot Tiny Home Sleeps Two Without a Loft Yanko Design

This Japanese Doll-Inspired Side Table Fits Two Contrasting Shapes Together Like a Perfect Puzzle Yanko Design

Awekeys RGB Neon gives metal keycaps two ways to light up Yanko Design

This Titanium-Coated Whiskey Glass Has an Aurora-Inspired Finish Yanko Design

Ato’s Radio-Inspired AI Assistant Trades Touchscreens for a Button and Knob Yanko Design