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

Cooper Hewitt

Image Making and Innovation at MillerKnoll

09.30

In conjunction with Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk on the critical role photography has played at MillerKnoll across the…

Read at Cooper Hewitt ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Image Making and Innovation at MillerKnoll

More from Cooper Hewitt on Hakken

“Design Across Time” Now on view Cooper Hewitt

Cooper Hewitt Unveils Permanent Collection Galleries Showcasing a Multi-Year Presentation of the National Design Collection Cooper Hewitt

Cooper Hewitt Celebrates 2026 National Design Award Winners and Honorees at Annual Gala Cooper Hewitt

Michelle Millar Fisher is Appointed Chief Curator of Cooper Hewitt Cooper Hewitt

Midwest Winner Cooper Hewitt