Emoji Deep Dive

In this activity, you’ll dive deep into the world of emojis and even design your own.

A Brief History of Emojis

Before emojis, people decorated their conversations with emoticons (short for "emotion icon"), such as 
:-)
or 
:-(
, which were used as early as 1982. Soon, more complicated kaomojis such as 
(^_^)
or 
(^.^)
were created in Japan, and by the late 1990s, early emojis were built into Japanese mobile phones, and they soon became popular worldwide.

So, people from multiple countries came together to decide how to make emojis universal across software around the world, and emojis became standardized, meaning that there is a detailed document describing how emojis should be transferred digitally and stored in binary.

For example, the "sparkling heart" emoji, 💖, is stored in binary as 11110000:10011111:10010010:10010110 according to the Unicode standard. Thanks to Unicode, different devices around the world all agree that that binary string means 💖 and not anything else, such as 💔.

Here are some of the most popular emojis in use these days. What's your favorite?
😂 ❤️ 😍 🤣 😊 🙏 💕 😭 😘 👍 😅 👏 😁 ♥️ 🔥 💔 💖 💙 😢 🤔 😆 🙄 💪 😉 ☺️ 🤗

Analyzing Emojis

The emojify word block in the Snap! file replaces words with emojis, but the word/emoji pairs were chosen by another programmer, and you might not agree with the pairs. Plus, an emoji is a picture, and like words, pictures can have different meanings to different people.

  1. Talk with Your PartnerPick a word/emoji pair from emojify word, and analyze it with a partner. Discuss these questions:
    1. What does this emoji assume about the culture of the person using it?
    2. What other meanings could the word have?
    3. What other emojis could match this word? Do you think any of them would be better?
    For example, here's how you might analyze the "dancer → 💃" pair:
    • What does this emoji assume about the culture of the person using it? The emoji shows a relatively young, light-skinned woman with blond hair in a dress and heels, but people of all ages, genders, and skin colors dance, and dance outfits vary across cultures.
    • What other meanings could the word have? A dancer could also be a hip-hop dancer, ribbon dancer, ice dancer, etc. And they might be a different age, be male presenting or non-binary, have different hair or skin color, prefer pants and sneakers, etc.
    • What other emojis could match this word? Do you think any of them would be better? There are other dance-related emojis:🕺🏻🩰👯‍♂️, but they're pretty specific too. The first is dancing disco, the second is ballet shoes, and the third has two dancers.
  1. Check out one or more of these TEDx Talks:

Designing an Emoji

The Unicode Consortium is the organization in charge of emojis (as well as all the other characters in Unicode, the standard for storing text in binary). They actually accept proposals from the public for new emojis.

  1. Talk with Your Partner Discuss what emoji you think the world needs.
    Maybe you'll design an emoji that would help you better express yourself, an emoji for your favorite hobby, or an emoji that represents a culture you come from.
  2. Draw the emoji on a sheet of paper or search the web for images that fit the ideas in your head.
  1. Plan out how your emoji would look in color as well as in black & white. All emojis must be available in both forms since not all digital devices support color.
  2. Check the official emoji list and see if something like your emoji is already in Unicode.
  1. Talk with Your Partner Consider these questions from the official Unicode Consortium emoji proposal process:
    • Can the emoji be used in multiple contexts? Can it be used as a metaphor?
    • Could the emoji be used with other emojis to create new meanings?
    • Is the emoji different from existing emoji?
  2. Share your emojis with your classmates. If you feel passionately about some of your proposals, perhaps you'll decide to go through the formal proposal process. Five years from now, you could be typing an emoji that you yourself proposed!
In this activity, you considered some of the cultural issues of emojis and designed an emoji of your own, considering the usefulness and uniqueness of your design.