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

A Clever Design for Waste-Reducing Bottles

10.30

These bottles are by Taiwanese industrial designer Rock Wang and design firm Agoood . They were designed for Hosay , a Taiwanese brand of sustainable cleaning and bodycare products.

Packaging Packaging|Packaging

Read at Core77 ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

A Clever Design for Waste-Reducing Bottles

Related

'My favourite Packaging Europe stories of 2026' Packaging Europe

Finalist Interview: Z1RO’s moulded fibre packaging from non-wood biomass Packaging Europe

Recycled PET bottle and 50% PCR stretch sleeve target circularity Packaging Europe

Miller Lite Celebrates The Brewers’ World Series Victory With Clinch Cans The Dieline

Edible seaweed ginger shot pods piloted by Innocent Drinks and Notpla Packaging Europe

A24’s Popcorn Bucket For ‘You Can See Everything’ Is All About Transparency, Literally The Dieline