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

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Week 39, 2026 — Packaging

Week 39, 2026. Packaging was the signal of the week.

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Week 39, 2026 — Packaging

Stories that week

Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-14-26 to 9-18-26) Core77

A 1973 Fiat Pickup Truck Core77

A Minimalist Wheeled Stool That Doesn't Look Like a Wheeled Stool Core77

From Hexagon to Hive: Designing Play Through the Geometry of Bees Core77

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Furniture Designer Chiara Verde's Cork Lounge Chair Core77

Why Did the Aerodynamic Look Go Away, and Will It Come Back? Core77

Examples of Well-Worn Objects Core77

Industrial Designer Erina Caldeira's Steel Twist on Woven Baskets Core77

Strutt's Awesome Powered Wheelchair is Not a Wheelchair (For Legal Reasons) Core77

Cea Design's Incredibly Modernist Hideaway Toilet Core77

The Rainwater Wall: A Space-Saving Water Harvesting Tank Core77