The emoji puzzle: how to fit everyone in, with Emojipedia’s Keith Broni - Episode 4

KB 0:00

So it's important to always have the options that are available in our emoji keyboard be increasing in a more diversity focused context. But there will always be limitations - there's a tension there. We cannot convey every single culture's variety of kind of core objects within the keyboard.

TS 0:19

Welcome to Made for us a podcast about the intersection of innovation and inclusion. It's for anyone who's curious about how to develop products that work better for all of us. My guest today is Keith Broni, the editor in chief of Emojipedia and emoji encyclopedia with millions of visitors each month. He made headlines a few years ago when he landed a job with a translation company as the world's first emoji translator. Since joining Emojipedia Keith spends his time analyzing emoji usage and trends and keeping track of the latest emoji arriving on our phones. In this episode, we'll be talking about the universal appeal of emoji, how they become more diverse over the years and some of the design challenges this presents. This is the first of two episodes on emoji. Be sure to stick around for part two, an interview with Rayouf Alhumedhi, the creator of the headscarf emoji, that's also out today. Now here's Keith with a brief introduction to Emojipedia.

KB 1:13

So my name is Keith Broni. I'm the editor in chief of Emojipedia.org, which is the world's number one emoji resource. It's part encyclopedia part design archive, we are out there looking at the world's emoji usage, documenting it providing it for free at the point of access for all of our global users to ensure that people are able to freely and quickly understand how you know their peers and others across the world are using emojis.

TS 1:43

So can you give us some examples of what people use Emojipedia for?

KB 1:47

So people come to Emojipedia for a variety of different reasons, they may want to copy and paste a brand new emoji that their device doesn't have yet, they may want to come to confirm suspicions about how emoji is used in a variety of different contexts. One great example is whether or not the folding hands is prayer or a high five and we have the definitive answer to that on Emojipedia but people also want to see how emoji designs differ and not just across different devices but have differed historically as well. So we have a massive design archive dating back to Nineteen ninety seven. Probably the earliest emoji sets in Japan showing some very early primitive pixel style emoji design. So people come to Emojipedia ultimately to find emoji information of all sorts.

TS 2:30

Okay, and for people who are dying to know the praying hands emoji, is it supposed to be prayer? Or is it a high five?

KB 2:37

So it's intended to be an individual person with their hands folded together. And you can actually see that when you go on to the Emojipedia site page for folded hands. And you'll see some of the earlier designs actually depict a person with their hands folded together. Now of course that gesture means praying in the Western world. But it can also of course mean namaste or kind of it's a gesture requesting forgiveness or appreciating tanks and some countries in the you know, across Asia and what have you. All of those are valid, but the key thing is it's supposed to be just one person. And you know when you look at how people are actually using this emoji, those are the contexts in which it's being used. But a little bit of confusion occurs because on certain platforms, if you enter in high five to your emoji keyboards kind of search tool, it will give you that folded hands emoji even though no one actually uses it like that.

TS 3:33

Right. Thank you for clearing that up. And before we continue, I should congratulate you because it's Emojipedia's 10 year anniversary.

KB 3:40

Yes, this year we've been in operation for 10 years, it's actually been an incredible privilege to have led the celebration for not just Emojipedia's 10th year in operation but also our 10th annual world emoji day celebration. So we actually host World emoji awards as part of world emoji day each year, we usually announce these across a variety of different you know, media platforms or media partners and what have you. The most popular new emoji this year was the plain pink heart emoji. It was actually no surprise, this was introduced back in September of last year and over subsequent months began to be introduced to various different devices. The plain pink heart, though is something that emoji users had been clamoring for years and years and years. So when it was finally introduced, there was no real surprise and winning the most popular new emoji award this year for sure. We also gave a lifetime achievement award to the rolling on the floor laughing emoji, that version of the crying laughing face that's kind of tilted on its side. It's currently number two in the world just behind the aforementioned face with tears of joy, the crying laughing face. So there's a lot of laughter out there in the emoji space.

TS 4:50

Amazing. So let's go on to talk about a brief history of emoji. Can you tell us briefly how they originated, how they end up on our phones and how often they updated

KB 5:00

So contemporary emojis originate from Japan in the late nineteen nineties. The very first emoji, or rather what we consider the very first emoji at Emojipedia was a small little love heart on a pager within Japan. In subsequent years, various different early mobile phones began to incorporate emoji keyboards, but they incorporated them in slightly different ways to each other, causing a need for convergence. And that brings us up to twenty ten. The international body the Unicode Consortium, decides as digital communications become more and more globalized, and platforms like Gmail and devices like the iPhone begin to be used worldwide that we need to be able to standardize how these emoji characters are used. And the Unicode Consortium standardizes all digital texts via their Unicode standard documentation. So from the number one to the letter A to all sorts of different global alphabets Unicode is responsible for ensuring that all of our digital devices are able to represent those symbols or characters or letters correctly. And the initial set of Japanese emojis were then incorporated into Unicode effectively wholesale. At the beginning, they were a Japan focused feature, though certain users realized and other countries that if you downloaded a certain app, you'd be able to kind of unlock them on your iPhone, and it was in twenty twelve that Apple effectively opened the emoji floodgates, and introduced the world to the emoji keyboard.

TS 5:00

So I read somewhere that emojis are used by 92% of the world's population.

KB 5:39

That's a well trotted out statistic alright. That's actually several years old at this point. So if anything, it's actually higher. People all across the world across all sorts of demographics, cultural age, people are using emojis within their digital communications. People want to be able to add, you know, emotional clarity to messages, but they also want to inject a sense of playfulness as well. And in fact, research in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, and linguistics has found that people perceive the placement of emojis within text messages or social media posts to be more indicative of a positive emotional tone on the part of the person who wrote that message than if those emojis are not present. And that holds true not just for the obvious, the emotionally expressive emojis or the emotional symbols like the hearts, but also the animals, the foods, people use emojis to convey emotional information. And that's relevant to absolutely everybody across the globe that's fortunate enough to have access to a digital device.

TS 7:41

So I wanted to talk about the trend towards more inclusive emoji. When did that begin? Was there a particular catalyst?

KB 7:48

Apple effectively opened the emoji floodgates for the Western world in around twenty twelve. Other platforms subsequently began adding emoji designs from Unicode's recommended set of emojis in subsequent years. So then we soon got the Google specific emoji set that adhere to the Unicode standard. Samsung released one soon after, Facebook then updated its set of emoji designs to be in line with Unicode recommendations. But something was quickly realized. And it came down to gender representation, and it came down to representation of people of different skin tones. In the early days of emojis, they were, you know, small, pixelated images, where gender information and race information wasn't explicitly obvious. But when Apple introduced their designs in kind of tail end of the Two thousands, when they were kind of doing them in a pre Unicode way, trying to match a set from one of the Japanese vendors, they had to make certain decisions in terms of gender representation and race representation. They matched the Japanese set and what was done there is every single person in the emoji keyboard had a very pale skin. And of course, not everybody across the world has pale skin, but everybody across the world wanted to use emojis. So there was a disconnect there.

There was hashtags going around saying, you know, emojis, so white. People didn't feel represented in the designs of people or hand gestures within the emoji keyboard. People began to quiz this, like, why is this the case. People began to quiz Apple as to why their designs were of this kind. And then people ultimately began to ask Unicode, who'd introduced all of the various kind of emoji concepts from Japan, as to why is are there not kind of more diverse options within the emoji keyboard? So it was actually at this time that Unicode effectively realized that emoji are going to be a work in progress for them constantly. They thought we'll introduce the set from Japan wholesale, and that'll be that, these are a novelty. But people loved them. People loved them because they're able to use them in the way I was describing earlier. They allow us to add semantic information. They're a very, very powerful paralinguistic tool to add additional emotional context. But people did not feel represented by the designs within the emoji keyboard. And so Unicode realized a change had to happen.

And that's why in Twenty fourteen, they declare that they were going to be introducing a means through which all of the people emoji characters will be able to have one of five different skin tone options, and that the default skin tone for all of the various designs that different vendors like Apple, Samsung Google, like I mentioned earlier, should actually be a neutral color. And there was some debate as to what that neutral color should be. Microsoft actually initially for all of its people emojis, introduced everybody having kind of a gray skin tone. But ultimately, all of the various emoji designers from those companies I mentioned earlier, converged around using yellow as a default skin tone clearly inspired by how the emoji the smiley emojis use that kind of yellow kind of skin tone, to try and emulate the classic smiley face emoji, or not emoji, but the smiley face icon created by Harvey Ball.

And there's problems with that still, I mean, a great comparison is how if you look at the Simpsons, yellow is an analogue for whiteness. So there has been a great amount of studies into how people actually use these different skin tone emojis and people with paler skin tones tend to just use the default, people with darker skin tones will use the one that better represents themselves. So it's an imperfect solution. But it's certainly better than not being able to represent people of all different races across the globe within the emoji keyboard given its popularity across the world.

TS: 11:52

And also on the issue of gender. I think there was some criticism as well, that the earlier emoji reinforced gender stereotypes.

KB: 12:00

Yes, that's absolutely true. And this was another criticism that was leveled against the kind of construction of the various kinds of concepts from the emoji keyboard from its earliest days. So again, the very first set of emojis, if gender was specified in the concept of like, say, a man or a woman, you would have certain stereotypical design features. But when it came to say, introducing a police officer, there had to be a choice. They're made by the emoji designers as to how to represent that person, and a gender decision was made. And that was the case for all of the people emojis on various different vendor sets within various vendors sets, specifically the Apple one. The Apple one from the early days in particular is the most influential one because it introduced the world, the wider world to emojis, and also considered given the huge market share of Apple devices in the United States was the one the majority of people were seeing. And Apple made a decision to represent a police officer as a man, a dancer as a woman, you know, a spy as a man, a person getting a haircut as a woman - the broad representation was that if you are active or had a profession, you were a man, if you're being passive, or doing something kind of casual, frivolous, you're a woman. And this was obviously unacceptable.

And therefore Unicode also recommended that all of the various companies that are implementing emoji designs should have representation, or men and women for all of the various people emojis. And that's actually also evolved over time, because of how the gender specifying versions of each of the people emojis are implemented, also meant that there was a third option within our emoji keyboards that was effectively the default non gender specifying version of say, the police officer or the person getting a haircut or what have you. But in Twenty-eighteen, Google specifically declared that they were going to revise the default design for that non gender specifying emoji version, to not be shared with one of the gender specifying designs would be its own unique design that would attempt to be a gender neutral representation. And this is a difficult thing to do in terms of design. What is gender neutrality in design? But all of the other emoji vendors ultimately came up with their own kind of way. So a more neutral, rounded kind of facial shape, kind of mid length haircuts, a variety different kind of specific color clothing with less gender specific attributes to just emphasize that this is conveying the concept of a person say getting their hair cut or a person working in the police force.

TS: 14:52

So obviously, all this has meant an explosion in the number of emoji, right? I mean, can you give a sense of how the emoji set has grown over the years? And how many are there now?

KB: 15:03

Sure. So at the moment, there are over three thousand six hundred different emoji characters represented by Unicode. Or rather, it's more correct to say different characters and sequences, that's down to how various variations are implemented. From a technical perspective, if you actually look at unique concepts from the emoji keyboard, there's about eighteen hundred to two thousand. So about, you know, sixteen hundred emojis are variations on other concepts. And that's, you know, one of the five different skin tone options that exists beyond neutral option, as well as you know, different gender representations for the people emoji specifically.

TS: 15:42

So you mentioned that, you know, tech companies have been very mindful of increasing representation in emoji, what are the incentives for them to do this?

KB: 15:52

I mean, ultimately, digital technology where emojis exists, our digital communication platforms are used all across the world, across all sorts of cultures, by people of all sorts of races. And the emoji keyboard is a tool through which people want to represent themselves and communicate about themselves and the world around them. And if people are looking at keyboard and seeing a world that's alien to them, then it's a failure on the device's part or the product's part to really be a utility for that person in that cultural context with their racial background, from their, you know, gender, background, etc. So ultimately, the emoji keyboard should be as representative as we possibly can have it be with us also dignifying that it is a set of characters that are attempting to be broadly representative of concepts that exist in our world. So be they the concept of kind of different racial backgrounds, the concept of different gender representations, different cultural objects, different foodstuffs, etc, the one thing that keyboard will always fail to do is be a perfect encapsulation of every single person out there. We will have approximations of the concept of a person with a beard, a woman with a hijab, the strawberry, a type of dumpling, but ultimately, these are broad based general representations. And that's all they can really be given the limited nature of them as are effectively a writing symbol with their own font. There is of course, though, a whole variety of different kind of emoji like tools through which people can better represent themselves and more specifically, so Apple has their kind of add emoji style feature, or the memojis, platforms like Bitmoji, where people are able to make emojiesque stickers of themselves. And you know, they're maybe more specific to their kind of cultural backgrounds. So it's important to always have the options that are available in our emoji keyboard be increasing in a more diversity focused context. But there will always be limitations, there's a tension there, we cannot convey every single cultures variety of kind of core objects within the keyboard.

TS: 18:11

But these challenges haven't deterred people from trying to get their culture represented. And if you spotted a gap in the emoji market, you can actually pitch your emoji idea to Unicode. Here's how it works.

KB: 18:22

There has been a huge amount of effort on the part of the Unicode Consortium with the last number of years to try and get more diverse voices involved in the emoji subcommittee, get more and more people like proposing more diverse emoji concepts, because this is actually a very key thing. While there's always going to be limitations to how many concepts we can really convey within the emoji keyboard. Anyone across the globe can actually propose a new emoji concept to Unicode, they usually accept proposals between April and July each year. And you basically have to follow a set of every thorough and transparent guidelines as to why you feel this emoji should be included in the keyboard. You need to project kind of different uses, contexts, the different demographics that would find this useful. Ideally, it would be an emoji that could have multiple different meanings and not be like overly specific, it could be kind of quite diverse, in its potential uses. And obviously, is not going to be a kind of copyrighted property, or represent a highly specific person, whether you know, living dead or completely fictional. So there's a whole host of different guidelines, selection factors and exclusion factors that you have to kind of adhere to when you're putting together your proposal. But literally anyone listening to this right now, can go on to Unicode website read those guidelines, a pair proposal for next year.

TS: 19:43

One particular group that would like better representation is people with red hair, but there are practical reasons why there isn't a redhead option for every person emoji.

KB: 19:51

When Unicode introduced people with red hair emojis, so you'd have a man or a woman and you know a non gender specifying person with red hair available in the keyboard, the response was actually quite negative, because people with red hair wanted to be able to add red hair to absolutely every single person emoji within the keyboard. So effectively have an additional hair modifier. And then that runs up the number of specific emoji designs that need to be implemented on our devices by- I haven't done the calculations in a long time, but could be upwards of another one thousand or so depending on the various disparate people. So it becomes a case of well, how many people are actually going to be using this versus how is this going to make the work of maintaining the emoji keyboard much more difficult for those involved in it.

TS: 20:42

And what you said about sort of, you know, the complexities of having lots of different combinations. I mean, this is true of the mixed race family, because I think there's many multiple combinations, but you still wouldn't be able to customize that to the variety of families that are out there.

KB: 20:59

Yes, this is unfortunately the case, given the manner in which emojis are implemented, they're effectively, you know, the designs that we see are like a font, if we add several tens of thousands of additional designs to that font, it becomes very, very difficult for it to operate in manner in which we expect it to work. Now, for example, I mentioned that there is three thousand six hundred, just over, emojis represented within the keyboard. Now, if we were to add skintone variation, customization to absolutely every single one of the family emoji options, that goes up to something like fifty thousand, and each of those combinations has to have a design associated with them. The design files can be considerable in size. So unfortunately, this is something that most platforms have avoided doing. Just in terms of streamlining operations. It also begs the question of like, should there have been emojis specifying different family combinations with explicit gender representation in the first place? Should there just have been a symbol that conveys the concept of a family, and this is actually something that's on Unicode's list of proposals for this year. Every September, Unicode will sign off an update to the Unicode standard. And that usually has a complimentary emoji update set of recommendations. And within the draft list this year, there are four different gender neutral family emojis that are intended to be represented via silhouettes. So you'd have one person, one child; two people, one child; one person, two children; and then two people, two children, with again, all of these people, parent or child, represented as a silhouette. Now, this is obviously a very, very diverse way of representing these concepts. Will people end up using them? We'll have to see.

TS: 23:00

So I guess this comes also comes down to the keyboard that we have, because on the one hand, there's some people who want additional customization. But then there's other people who are complaining about emoji clutter and having too many emojis to scroll through to find the one that you want. And I guess the keyboard on our phones hasn't really adapted that much.

KB: 23:22

No, the emoji keyboard hasn't really evolved a huge amount over the last 10 years. I mean, many platforms have rightly introduced a search functionality. But this emoji clutter is something that people do discuss, in fact, the current head of the Unicode emoji subcommittee, Jennifer Daniel, they say that there's a lot of truth to the phrase that the emoji keyboard could be considered a junk drawer, because there's some stuff that's been added there historically, that when you actually look at how people are using these concepts, these emojis, or how often they're using them. They're barely used at all. I mean, there's a lot of different concepts in there that you would question as to why do they exist? Why do we have so many different types of ship for example? Why is there so many different train options? Why is there so many different options for different vehicles that are either facing to the side or facing forward?

Again, this goes back to emojis originally conceived utility in early versions of the internet, being able to represent information about transport and geography was seen as being quite valuable alongside being able to represent, say, emotional associations. And of course, the keyboard is going to evolve from there, but those emojis remain, because ultimately, as Unicode is maintaining a standard document of all of the various writing systems across the world, no emoji will ever be removed from the keyboard, because that would mean devices that are updated to the newer version of the standard that's removed that concept could no longer read a text message or a social media posts from say five years ago that happens to have that emoji character within it. So to remove a concept is to remove the ability of new digital devices going forward to read older texts. And that's completely contrary to Unicode its goal of digitizing all text and allowing it to be accessible across all of our devices going forward.

TS: 25:20

So is there a limit to how many emoji we can have?

KB: 25:23

So yes, there is a limit to the number of emoji we can have. But we haven't quite approached it. In fact, we are still a long way away from that number. There is ultimately a limit to how many characters Unicode can encode based on how it encodes them. But that's still a while away in the future. One of the biggest problems really about the number of images that we can have comes down to how they're implemented within the keyboard effectively as a font with an individual design for all these various combinations. As that number grows, the size of the font that needs to be utilized, grows, and basically makes processing it more and more difficult as the size increases. So there's a limit. It's very, very far away. But there are technical limitations as to why we want to be a little bit more discerning as to what gets added to the keyboard in terms of how our devices get to use that, you know, series of designs, and also how many people are actually going to end up using the item within the keyboard especially if the keyboard doesn't change as we're discussing, and it just becomes a even bigger junk drawer as it were.

TS: 26:38

Thanks to Keith Broni of Emojipedia. If you have more questions about emoji, you'll find the link to their website in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. I'm Tosin Sulaiman. Thanks for joining me on Made For Us.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai