Broader emoji help tell story of diverse world
A picture is worth a thousand words, but in the age of smartphones and text messaging, an emoji can communicate an entire story. That’s one of the reasons that broadening the emoji apparel category has been important to Palo Alto’s Florie Hutchinson, who successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium for three new emojis to be added this year: a woman’s one-piece bathing suit, men’s bathing trunks and a men’s brief.
“Visual language is hugely
influential. It transcends international boundaries,” said Hutchinson, an arts publicist who made news in 2018 for creating the women’s flat-shoe emoji in an effort to squash gender stereotypes. “Emoji are democratic in the creation process; anyone can suggest one. I had hoped my first emoji would encourage others to want to diversify what was available through the proposal process, and it has.”
These small digital images — used to express emotions or represent people, places and objects — have so fully integrated themselves into how we communicate that the Oxford English Dictionary named an emoji — the face with tears of joy — the word of the year in 2015.
Now, with the Feb. 5 announcement of 59 new emoji approved by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit Mountain View tech industry group responsible for approving new ones, more attention is being paid to the emoji’s role in widening representation of all kinds. The new emoji — which rise to 230 with gender and skin-tone variations counted, in addition to the 2,823 emoji already in use — include depictions of people with disabilities, interracial couples, prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, an Indian sari garment and a drop of blood.
Jennifer 8. Lee, a member of the Unicode Consortium, said this year’s newcomers are part of a pattern of diversifying emoji that began four years ago.
“Since 2015, emoji have been generally getting more representative,” Lee said. She pointed out that in 2015, skintone options were expanded and in 2016, female counterparts in the occupation category were included. In 2017, culturally diverse emoji like Chinese dumplings, takeout boxes, fortune cookies and chopsticks were added, as well as the Muslim hijab. Last year notably saw the red Lunar New Year envelope.
Emoji began in the chatroom culture of the late 1990s as emoticons, a series of punctuation characters which were assembled together to create images that looked like faces. The first emoji were created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita as 12-by-12 pixel images in 1999. The original 176 emoji, which are now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, are also the foundation of the official emoji keyboard released in 2011 by Apple. (Android added an emoji keyboard in 2013.)
Apple originally proposed expanding the disability-related icons last year and collaborated with organizations including the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, the American Council of the Blind and the National Association of the Deaf. Apple’s proposal said the new emoji would “provide a wider array of options to represent basic categories for people with disabilities.” The company noted in the proposal that even though the disabled community includes more than 1 billion people worldwide, “the most compelling factor for this proposal is not frequency of use of each character, but the desire to be inclusive in representation.”
The Unicode Consortium has been reviewing and approving submissions for new emoji since 2010. It was created “to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard” according to its website.
“The emoji collection has become generally more inclusive and representative as ordinary people have become more sophisticated in creating emoji proposals,” Lee said. But even with the addition of interracial couples, the interracial family emoji has yet to be added, she noted.
The emoji has also become a tool for easy alerts across language barriers in the event of an emergency. Medical-related emoji, such as the drop of blood and campaigns to expand the organ emoji options, are significant for their ability to mass communicate issues like blood and organ donation, Hutchinson said, as well as to send alerts in crisis.
“Just look at the mosquito emoji, which was suggested by the Gates Foundation,” she said. “That’s almost universally recognized and used to communicate about the spread of disease.”
Although the success of the flat-shoe emoji didn’t directly spark Hutchinson’s latest campaign, the interest in expanding the fashion emoji category lingered after she explored what was available.
“As a whole, it was a very gender-normative, 1950s picture,” she said. “I kept coming back to the bikini. It was a flagrant example of gender stereotypes, like the song,” she said, referring to Brian Hyland’s 1960 hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”
“I joked this time I didn’t want to forget the men (with the swimsuit and briefs), but really, everyone benefits from greater options.” All four of Hutchinson’s emoji were created by graphic designer Aphee Messer.
The new emoji typically start showing up on mobile phones in the fall, although some platforms may release them earlier, according to Unicode.
Hutchinson said she isn’t working on any further new proposals, but she isn’t ruling out future emoji suggestions.
“I did see in the last round of applications that someone suggested a fondue pot,” Hutchinson said, jokingly. “I’m half Swiss. When I saw it I thought, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ That’s definitely one I can get behind.”