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

Yanko Design

This Ontario Cottage Puts a Covered Outdoor Room Between Its Two Halves

10.30

The middle of DogTrot Magnetawan is outdoors. A covered breezeway cuts through this lakeside cottage in Ontario, creating a place for summer meals, a wooden kayak, and the passage between its two…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

This Ontario Cottage Puts a Covered Outdoor Room Between Its Two Halves

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Copper-clad Maserati GranTurismo brings handcrafted luxury + gullwing doors to a bespoke grand tourer Yanko Design

Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars Yanko Design

This Desert Pavilion Concept Would Let You Adjust the Shade by Remote Yanko Design

MyGlamper mounts on your SUV hitch and inflates into a large, 12-person tent at the campsite Yanko Design

Compath Imagines Dementia Navigation Without a Touchscreen Yanko Design

Kord and Bark Give a Power Strip a Wooden Case Worth Leaving on Display Yanko Design