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

WIKO’s $1,220 Hi MateBook 14 puts a gorgeous 3:2 OLED on a very practical laptop

September 29

WIKO started in Marseille, spent a decade making budget Androids, got acquired by a Chinese telecom group in 2021, found its way into Huawei’s retail ecosystem, and is now selling a laptop with a…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

WIKO’s $1,220 Hi MateBook 14 puts a gorgeous 3:2 OLED on a very practical laptop

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

The 8kg Spider Chair That Refuses to Wobble on Any Floor Yanko Design

Bose Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds are an absolute steal for $99 Yanko Design

Meta Just Turned Its AI Into a Tamagotchi and It’s Pretty Cute Yanko Design

Klara Is the Coffee Table That Lets You Fake a Tidy Room Yanko Design

The 8 Japanese-Designed Everyday Objects Worth Building a Habit Around Yanko Design

AeroPress Built a Coffee Maker Nobody Wants to Hide Yanko Design