Museumacquires 2 emoji that symbolize inclusion
The CooperHewitt, NEWYORK— SmithsonianDesignMuseum has acquired two emoji that have helped broadendiversity for users of the tiny pictures, becoming the third museum to add emoji to their digital collections.
TheNewYorkmuseumacquired the “person with headscarf” and “inter-skintone couple” emoji for its burgeoning collection of digital assets. Themuseum plans an exhibition on the significance of the two through interviews and images, but the pandemic has put an opening date in limbo, said Andrea Lipps, Cooper Hewitt’s associate curator of contemporary design.
“Thedesire toacquiretheseparticular emoji arose fromwhatwe were seeing as the desire for inclusion and representation of various groups andcommunities and couples on the emoji keyboard,” Lipps told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of Thursday’s announcement.
The hijab emoji, as it’s informally known, was submitted in 2016 to theUnicode Consortium, a nonprofit that oversees emoji standards with voting members fromtheworld’s top digital companies. It arrived on phones and computers in 2017. Athen 15-yearold Saudi Arabian girl, Rayouf Alhumedhi, attractedworldwide attention as she campaigned for its inclusion. She was selected as one of Time magazine’s most influential teens of 2017.
Roughly 550 million women in the world wear the hijab, Alhumedhiamongthem, yet there was no emoji to represent them. The samewas true of skin tones,
and advocates remain vigilant in gettingmultiracial family emojion keyboards, beyond the two-person couple options.
Theinterracialcouple emojiwas submitted toUnicode in 2018 and arrivedondevices last year, giving people their first chance to combine multiple skin tones in a single emoji. It builds on the advocacy work of Katrina Parrott, a Black, Houston-based entrepreneurinspiredtocreatediverseskin tones in emoji after her daughter lamented she couldn’t properly represent herself on keyboards.
As a third-party developer, Parrottwas the first to put outmultiracial emoji through her ownapp, iDiversicons, five years ago. She advocated as a non-voting member ofUnicode for the consortium to do the same for a wide array of devices. Acampaignleading tothe inclusion of interracial couples, later spearheaded by the dating app Tinder and others, received aWebby Award last year. Parrott was not involved in development of the couples emoji but noted the
significance in promoting greater diversity.
“We said we don’t want to do just an appforAfricanAmericans. We want to represent the world because everybodywas feeling the lack in emojis,” Parrott told the AP of her pioneering app.
The hijab and interracial couplesemojiweredesignedbyAphelandra Messer, who was working at the time for Emojination, a grassroots group that advocates for more inclusive and representative emoji.
The Cooper Hewitt announcement follows the 2016 acquisition of the original DoCoMo emoji set by theMuseum ofModern Art in NewYork. DoCoMois a topmobile phone operator in Japan, where emoji began. In 2018, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London acquired the proposed mosquito emoji design. All are part of a larger effort for museums and cultural institutions to preserve significant parts of digital history and culture.