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

Core77

Translucent Leather Wallets

October 2

Here's an unusual wallet by South Korean leathermaker Eriist : You've seen the spring-steel closure on coin purses before. That's not the notable bit.

Materials|Materials

Read at Core77 ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Translucent Leather Wallets

More from Core77 on Hakken

Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-28-26 to 10-2-26) Core77

In an Industrial Space, a Freestanding Bedroom Structure as Home-Within-a-Home Core77

These Ignition Button Covers for Cars Will Surely Fill the Hole in Your Life Core77

Hell in a Handbasket: An Add-On Reading Screen for Your Phone So You Don't Have to Develop Willpower Core77

UTV Decks: How to Transport a UTV Without a Trailer Core77

"A Design Wonderland:" The X-D-E-P-O-T, a Repository of Good Design Core77