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 Convertible Bench Lets You Choose Between Company and Privacy

October 8

Cities are designed around togetherness. Parks, campuses, transit hubs, waiting areas, and public plazas usually assume that people want to sit near one another, talk, observe, or participate in the…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

This Convertible Bench Lets You Choose Between Company and Privacy

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Ex-Dyson designer builds a Y2K Nokia-flavored landline for kids Yanko Design

The Café That Refuses to Take the Scaffolding Down Yanko Design

This $30,000 Porsche 911 sofa has a mini-bar where the engine should be Yanko Design

Nobody Asked for Inflatable Chopsticks. Now We Want Them. Yanko Design

This VR System Gets Bigger So It Doesn’t Have to Touch Your Face Yanko Design

Globe Trotter’s limited-edition 007-inspired Casino Royale suitcase and travel accessories for Bond fans Yanko Design