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 pixel-covered MINI concept makes the Hyundai Ioniq 5 look subtle

10.19

Hyundai got everybody talking about pixels in 2019, when the 45 EV Concept showed up in Frankfurt with square-cut lights, and the Ioniq 5 carried the idea to showrooms in 2021.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This pixel-covered MINI concept makes the Hyundai Ioniq 5 look subtle

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Scooby-Doo Birkenstock Concepts Actually Look Like the Gang Yanko Design

This porcelain Pioneer DJ setup belongs in a museum, not an Ibiza nightclub Yanko Design

These retro-modern Headphones put audio adjustments on physical dials and tactile switches Yanko Design

Clevetura S Keyboard Review: Swipe Across the Keys Instead of Reaching for a Mouse Yanko Design

Porsche Mission S ditches the center screen for a driver-focused supercar cockpit Yanko Design

Kojima x CASETiFY: Game-World Gear You Can Actually Carry Yanko Design