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 Madrid restaurant built a greenhouse to sell the vegetables it cooks with

11.06

I’ll admit it, I have never once looked at a supermarket tomato and wondered where it grew up. Filandón, a restaurant tucked into the woods of El Pardo on the edge of Madrid, wants to fix that habit…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This Madrid restaurant built a greenhouse to sell the vegetables it cooks with

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

This Retro Radio Gives You a Reason to Leave Your Phone in Another Room Yanko Design

Holy Damn, Someone Built A Carbon-Fiber Ford Shelby with a 1,000Hp V8 Yanko Design

Kengo Kuma’s Copenhagen Bathhouse Puts an Open-Air Pool Between Five Brick Towers Yanko Design

Louis Vuitton’s $25,200 mirror steel watch keeps its shine without the scratches Yanko Design

Camp Snap’s screen-free camcorder for kids records without Wi-Fi, and has a ‘TikTok’ setting Yanko Design

Who needs an hour hand when your watch has satellites? Yanko Design