Cooper Hewitt acquires two emoji that symbolize inclusion
NEWYORK » The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has acquired two emoji that have helped broaden diversity for users of the tiny pictures, becoming the third museum to add emoji to their digital collections.
The New York museum acquired the “person with headscarf” and “inter-skintone couple” emoji for its burgeoning collection of digital assets. The museum 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.
“The desire to acquire these particular emoji arose from what we were seeing as the desire for inclusion and representation of various groups and communities and couples on the emoji keyboard,” Lipps told The Associated Press in an interview.
The hijab emoji, as it’s informally known, was submitted in 2016 to the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that oversees emoji standards with voting members from the world’s top digital companies. It arrived on phones and computers in 2017. .
Roughly 550 million women in the world wear the hijab, yet there was no emoji to represent them. The same was true of skin tones, and advocates remain vigilant in getting multiracial family emoji on keyboards, beyond the two-person couple options. The interracial couple emoji was submitted to Unicode in 2018 and arrived on devices last year, giving people their first chance to combine multiple skin tones in a single emoji.