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

Why Did the Aerodynamic Look Go Away, and Will It Come Back?

September 18

For automakers on the cusp of the 1990s, interest in aerodynamic efficiency was high. This yielded popular cars—the 1988 Honda CRX, the 1989 Ford Thunderbird, the 1990 Mazda RX-7—with drag…

Heritage & nostalgia Cars|Cars

Read at Core77 ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Why Did the Aerodynamic Look Go Away, and Will It Come Back?

Related

A 1978 Vancouver Special Gets a “Sophisti-Quirk” Reinvention Design Milk

Japanステロタイプ30周年記念展 Japan Design Net

Does Novo Nordisk’s slimmed down rebrand signal a new era of DTC revivalism? Fast Company Design

Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Celebrates 25th Anniversary With Silver Exhibition Colossal

How retro branding is bringing warmth and fun to São Paulo’s bars and restaurants It's Nice That

Amsterdam’s Brandt gallery celebrates 10th anniversary with major rebrand Creative Review