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

Creative Boom

Ester Pazur on being a 'pessimist', the power of stop-motion and why handmade art still matters

September 21

After losing commissions to AI, the stop-motion animator started posting her hand-drawn work online and found a community of like-minded people instead.

Motion & dynamic brands Craft & material Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Ester Pazur on being a 'pessimist', the power of stop-motion and why handmade art still matters

Related

Isabel + Helen showcase their "obsession with movement" with kinetic models at The Conran Shop Dezeen Interiors

Four handcrafted ceramic vessels in a mirror-silver anniversary box Mindsparkle Mag

Greenspace crafts brand identity for Philip Webb-designed One Palace Green Design Week

Evolving Craft Disegno

ARKEN's identity system runs on 80s signage and binary motion Mindsparkle Mag

Japan名古屋・文化のみち橦木館で「深堀隆介展―『金魚の唄』」開催。現代美術、歴史的建築、伝統工芸、最先端建築の融合 AXIS