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 42, 2026 — AI in design

Week 42, 2026. AI in design was the signal of the week.

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Week 42, 2026 — AI in design

Stories that week

Core77 Weekly Roundup (10-5-26 to 10-9-26) Core77

Researchers Develop a Tire Prototype with Replaceable Treads Core77

Red Bull's Hilarious Flugtag DIY Flying Machine Competition Core77

A Handmade Iron Pourover Coffee Rig Core77

Inkaren's Corner-Bound Notebooks Core77

BMW Unveils Radical New 3 Series Cockpit Core77

This In-Flight Cocooning Blanket Core77

An Industrial Design Classic: Richard Sapper's Telefunken Match Core77

Ettore Sottsass's Convention-Bucking Valigia Desk Lamp Core77

User Feedback Yields a Useful Study Object Made of Brass Core77

A Bauhausian Take on the Coat Rack Core77

A Simple, Versatile, "Handy" Mobile Furniture Piece Core77