You might remember this post from a month ago, partly because whoever tried to translate this got it all jumbled up and wrong. And seriously, Webster online is nowhere near the exact subtle truth – mostly because it doesn’t have the vocab for aesthetic and design principles. John Maeda has them – and the kanjis come from his book “The Laws of Simplicity” I managed to grab in a Soho bookstore back in September with Tommy Mesmer (and currently we’re working on a very funky project, but more about that next year). So here’s what Maeda has to say about the kanjis:

愛着

aichaku is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an artifact. When written by its two kanji characters, you can see that the first character means “love” and the second one means “fit”. “Love-fit” describes a deeper kind of emotional attachment that a person can feel for an object. It is a kind of symbiotic love for an object that deserves affection not for what it does, but for what it is.  (Laws of Simplicity, get it on Amazon)

As it happens, I’m doing nothing by the book. Artifact is right, object is wrong.