Signal of the week

Packaging · 10 stories, +6 vs last week

Packaging: 10 stories in seven days, +6 on the week before.

Finalist Interview: Z1RO’s moulded fibre packaging from non-wood biomass Packaging Europe

Recycled PET bottle and 50% PCR stretch sleeve target circularity Packaging Europe

Latest

Core77Core77 Weekly Roundup (10-26-26 to 10-30-26) Here's what we looked at this week: A good idea for a lamp for Ferrari fanatics-- based on a 1970s East German design . Improvised tools: A creative "juggad" leak detector.

11.01

Core77Unidome's Transparent Igloos Earlier we looked at the work of Dream Domes , a UK-based event structure company. They've worked out a way to erect large event tents with no central support.

11.01

Core77Industrial Design Student Work: A Hard Drive that Visually Indicates How Full It Is This morphing hard drive enclosure is by Antonin Odin , done as an Industrial Design student at France's ENSCI .

11.01

DezeenScrapped marine rope recast as stools that rock like buoys Rotterdam studio The New Raw has used discarded rope salvaged from the city’s harbour to create a series of 3D-printed public seating for its waterfront.

11.01

Yanko Design5 Home Office Upgrades That Rethink How You Sit, Store, and Charge Spending most of the day at a desk makes you surprisingly familiar with its little annoyances. There’s the chair that never quite fits, the papers occupying your mouse’s territory, and the charging…

11.01

Yanko DesignNUO Pairs a Rocking Knife With a Board That Actually Guides It A pile of fresh herbs has a way of becoming a much larger project once the chopping starts. Leaves spread across the board, little pieces escape the blade, and suddenly you’re gathering everything…

10.31

Spoon & TamagoJapanJapan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2026 Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display.

10.31

AbduzeedoInside Fritz-Kola: Global Branding by Robot Food

10.31

Yanko DesignJojo’s Headphone Concept Adjusts Like a Yo-Yo, Without Sliders A headphone cable usually gets treated as the part you tolerate. It hangs off the ear cup, catches on things, and rarely contributes much to the design beyond getting sound where it needs to go.

10.31

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

One letter a week, starting soon.

Signal of the week

Packaging: 10 stories in seven days, +6 on the week before.

Finalist Interview: Z1RO’s moulded fibre packaging from non-wood biomass Packaging Europe

Recycled PET bottle and 50% PCR stretch sleeve target circularity Packaging Europe

Latest

TypewolfDaylight

TypewolfHeart & Soil

TypewolfDirty Vine

Core77Core77 Weekly Roundup (10-26-26 to 10-30-26) Here's what we looked at this week: A good idea for a lamp for Ferrari fanatics-- based on a 1970s East German design . Improvised tools: A creative "juggad" leak detector.

Core77Unidome's Transparent Igloos Earlier we looked at the work of Dream Domes , a UK-based event structure company. They've worked out a way to erect large event tents with no central support.

Core77Industrial Design Student Work: A Hard Drive that Visually Indicates How Full It Is This morphing hard drive enclosure is by Antonin Odin , done as an Industrial Design student at France's ENSCI .

DezeenScrapped marine rope recast as stools that rock like buoys Rotterdam studio The New Raw has used discarded rope salvaged from the city’s harbour to create a series of 3D-printed public seating for its waterfront.

Yanko Design5 Home Office Upgrades That Rethink How You Sit, Store, and Charge Spending most of the day at a desk makes you surprisingly familiar with its little annoyances. There’s the chair that never quite fits, the papers occupying your mouse’s territory, and the charging…

Yanko DesignNUO Pairs a Rocking Knife With a Board That Actually Guides It A pile of fresh herbs has a way of becoming a much larger project once the chopping starts. Leaves spread across the board, little pieces escape the blade, and suddenly you’re gathering everything…

Spoon & TamagoJapanJapan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2026 Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display.

AbduzeedoInside Fritz-Kola: Global Branding by Robot Food

Yanko DesignJojo’s Headphone Concept Adjusts Like a Yo-Yo, Without Sliders A headphone cable usually gets treated as the part you tolerate. It hangs off the ear cup, catches on things, and rarely contributes much to the design beyond getting sound where it needs to go.