Actually, QR codes never went away
Don’t call it a comeback. Roy Healy’s first tattoo wasn’t the kind people usually regret, like a future ex’s name or a quotation in a language one can’t read. Still, he was nervous about it. He had asked the artist to ink a QR code on the inside of his wrist, directing to a website he owned, and he wasn’t confident it would scan.
Over the course of a twohour session in September 2019, he prepared himself to accept the tattoo “as a statement about the hubris of trying to mix technology and organics.”
To his pleasant surprise, though, the code worked. Now, Mr. Healy, a 33-yearold software engineer in Cork, Ireland, can change the link it points to — his personal blog, the rules of a card game, his LinkedIn profile — at his whim.
Such body art is “not particularly common,” Brian Greenberg, 48, a Linux system administrator whose own QR code tattoo directed, at one point, to a GIF of the word “soup,” wrote in an email. The codes themselves have fallen in and out of favor with the general public over the years; Comscore, an analytics firm, found that U.S. consumers’ use of QR codes for purchases declined between 2018 and 2020. Then COVID-19 hit.
In the spring and summer, restaurants began displaying codes at outdoor dining tables instead of passing out menus. Schools use them for health checks. Vaccine sites are using them for appointment sign-ins. If you’ve left the house during the pandemic, you’ve probably seen or scanned one.
The appeal of QR codes is obvious: They’re touch-free and easy to scan. They have a frank, unimpeachable logic. As Joe Waters, the author of “QR Codes for
Dummies,” put it: “They just work.” In a time when many things are not working, that utility appeals.
The QR code (which stands for “quick response”) was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara, then a young engineer at a Japanese company called Denso Wave, a former business division of Denso, an automotive manufacturer. On a Zoom call and through a translator, he said that he did not anticipate the market use of QR codes would grow globally. (He originally created them to streamline car part production.)
Still, he has been proud to see QR codes “supporting the safety and security of our society” during the pandemic.
Asked to explain it in simple terms, he said: “The QR code is to connect people and information.”
Although they have been persistently popular for payments and other services in Asia, in the U.S., until recently, they were widely seen as unsexy, even a hassle. In 2015, TechCrunch called QR codes both a “laughingstock” and “a frustrating symbol of over-engineering” in the span of 41 words. Scott Stratten, who wrote a book with his wife, Alison Stratten, about QR code malpractice, said the codes were the “Jurassic Park” of marketing — something brands adopted because they could, not necessarily because they should.
In China QR codes are ubiquitous. More than 90% of mobile payments in China are made on WeChat and AliPay, which rely on digital wallets and QR codes. But as with many technologies, their use has also led in recent years to questions about privacy, surveillance and social control. During the pandemic, the Chinese government has used QR codes to track citizens’ health status.