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

DesignWanted

We Design Beirut 2027: the programme of the 3rd edition

October 14

From 26 to 30 May 2027, one of the Mediterranean’s most important and dynamic design events, We Design Beirut, returns,

Senza categoria Craftsmanship Design Events

Read at DesignWanted ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

We Design Beirut 2027: the programme of the 3rd edition

More from DesignWanted on Hakken

Apple introduces Apple Home Collection with LG and Schneider Electric DesignWanted

CIFF Shanghai 2026: Italian design meets China through taste, not just products DesignWanted

Gustaf Westman turns Mickey Mouse into furniture and homeware DesignWanted

Talkid: Keep the connection, remove the smartphone DesignWanted

Raw, rebel, real: Dutch Design Week 2026 is coming back to the essence of design DesignWanted

The first Quiet Room in a public space of Milan defines spaces for different ways of being and living DesignWanted