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 Tiny Home Wraps Its Living Room in Glass and Keeps the Main Bedroom Downstairs

10.28

Tall, divided windows wrap around Leah’s living room, giving this small home the appearance of a glazed garden pavilion.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This Tiny Home Wraps Its Living Room in Glass and Keeps the Main Bedroom Downstairs

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

This DIY PlayStation 2 Handheld Gives a Foldable Phone Screen a New Job Yanko Design

Strapsicle’s iPad Cases Trade Gripping the Edges for a Silicone Hand Strap Yanko Design

Instax Mini Evo 2 Brings Retro Fun Without Giving Up Digital Yanko Design

$229 Galaxy Buds On arrive with hands-free AI operation and smooth gestures Yanko Design

The 8 Best Halloween Designs for a Delightfully Spooky October Yanko Design

km5’s Sp1 Speaker and Mp1 Mixer Give CD Listening a DJ-Style Twist Yanko Design