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 glowing modular moss panel system might be the coolest way to fix a boring room

October 14

Moss has been on this planet for around 450 million years, which means it predates dinosaurs, continents as we know them, and the concept of a watering schedule.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This glowing modular moss panel system might be the coolest way to fix a boring room

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

This chrome skeleton is the most extra mechanical keyboard ever made Yanko Design

A Suspended Walkway Leads to This Tiny Cabin Overlooking the Salish Sea Yanko Design

An Angled Public Bench for Hanging Out Without the Coffee Tab Yanko Design

This Tiny Home Fits a Downstairs Bedroom and Two Lofts Into 24 Feet Yanko Design

Twelve New Designs in Six Weeks: Why I Love the new Apple under John Ternus Yanko Design

Extra wide street-legal Ford hatchback takes on-lookers by surprise Yanko Design