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

Design Week

design/leader: Daniel Nicholas, design director & partner at Super Okay

10.24

This week, we interview Daniel Nicholas , design director & partner at Super Okay . Based in New York, Daniel is a visual designer & creative director with a decade of experience in the creative and…

Read at Design Week ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

design/leader: Daniel Nicholas, design director & partner at Super Okay

More from Design Week on Hakken

Oh, Apple Music has a new logo. We talk with Curtis Free about why the making matters more in an AI world. Design Week

Getty Images is bankrupt but, still in business thanks to massive Koch deal Design Week

Derek Man drives the design thinking behind Penguin’s events Design Week

Thirst designs canteen-inspired bottle for Archie Rose and Chris Hemsworth Design Week

East Surrey Council reveals in-house brand identity ahead of 2027 launch Design Week

Surge or authorship: which studio are you building? Design Week