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

Surface

Ramesh Nair on The Power of Craft, Feeling, and History

September 30

From Hermes to Moynat to Joseph Duclos, the fashion designer and artistic director has built his career on two beliefs: the artisan matters most, and the best ideas are often waiting in a museum…

Craft & material

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Ramesh Nair on The Power of Craft, Feeling, and History

Related

Accidental greenwashing – Chacho Puebla on the launch of his anti-greenwashing course Design Week

Inside the Craft of Kelvin Zero: Web Design by Cuberto Abduzeedo

Jung von Matt DONAU Crafts The Vienna Template UI Design Abduzeedo

JapanAZUMA FARM Koiwai, a Private Forest Sauna Crafted for the Art of Bathing Pen

Himkok RTD: Inside OlssønBarbieri's New Packaging Design Abduzeedo

Jessica Hische turns her hand-made lettering into emotional first aid for kids Creative Boom