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

Wuben’s tiny flashlight packs 500 lumens and a blade into 40 grams

10.25

My phone flashlight handles most of my after-dark chores, which is a funny confession from someone who writes about EDC gear for a living.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Wuben’s tiny flashlight packs 500 lumens and a blade into 40 grams

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

This AI Assistant Looks Like a Tiny Monitor but Actually Operates Your Computer Yanko Design

Neo-Brutalist Vases Look Like Tiny Towers, Even Without Flowers Yanko Design

A 258-Square-Foot Container Cabin Without the Visual Clutter Yanko Design

BIONIC’s iPhone Duo Stand Makes the Foldable Look Like a Miniature Monitor Yanko Design

Breville’s Spiral Luxe Automates Pour-Over Coffee With a Sliding Dripper Yanko Design

BYREDO’s Steel Spheres Reveal Hidden Landscapes Inspired by Scent Yanko Design