Emoji by the People, For the People, a CS50 tech talk by Jennifer 8. Lee

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all right.
Ah, hi, everyone.
Welcome.
And thank you for coming.
I'm pleased today to introduce Jenny Lee, who is a vice chair of the Unicode Emoji subcommittee.
Graduated from the college herself and is back in Cambridge today to talk with us all about emoji.
So please join me in welcoming Jenny Lee.
Thank you.
I stand think here is good.
So a fun fact professor and Malin and I actually, we're in the same class at Harvard, and I actually took CS 50 as, ah, freshman, because I was in applied math and economics, Major.
But at that point, it was not like the lifestyle brand that has since become s O.
I definitely appreciate, like all the bells and whistles and the fact that we now get free pizza and, like, lots of live streaming, So Ah, David, I guess, Saw.
I guess maybe you saw Jimmy Kimmel appearance I had on emoji and asked me to come speak.
So I'm gonna give you sort of a fun overview of like, how does an emoji become an emoji?
Um, So I'm going to start the story with my friend whose name is being Lou, who is a designer very well known for having designed a Twitter fail well, And she's Chinese Australia, and I'm Chinese American, and we were texting about dumplings.
So that is what Chinese ish women do with each other.
And so I texted her.
You know, this photo of dumplings that I was cooking and she was like, Yum, yum, yum, yum fried dumplings, You know, Hey, a knife and fork, knife and fork and then letting She's like, I'm surprised that apple doesn't have a dumpling emoji.
And I was like, Oh, huh, Good point.
And then, like, you know, that would probably been the end of anything because, you know, many conversations just sort of end on the like surprise that something doesn't exist.
But half an hour later on my screen pops like this dumpling with blinking eyes.
You don't actually get the whole full of fact of, like, the bling bling dumpling ah, that she had created.
And she had decided to design her own dumpling emoji because she was designer.
And she's like, I can fix this them.
I was really kind of startled when I discovered there was no dumpling emoji, right, cause like I knew that emoji originally Japanese.
And that's why there are a lot of Japanese foods on the keyboard, right?
Um, so you know, there's Rahman.
There's the bento box.
There's curry.
There's Campora.
They're, like, kind of a bunch of weird Japanese foods.
Like Think these were like, fit?
I've seen this on this region.
Japan, I think, like fishy things on a stick.
This is a fish cake you wanted to call old.
And yeah, they have.
And it's their fishy things.
Very honesty.
Um, basically, I mean, there's even like the whole, like rice ball that looks like it's had a bikini wax.
And so But there was no dumpling emoji, which I thought was very strange because, like if you think about it, dumplings or universal food like every country, has their version of a dumb playing like it's an empanada or paro G or, um, you know, uh, Paul Meany or like even ravioli is a form of dumpling like essentially like there's universal truth of yummy goodness inside her car boy carbohydrate shell that basically every culture has discovered.
Um, so I was like, Okay, dumplings are universal, and, of course, a movie or universal and the fact that therefore, there wasn't a dumb thing about due to told me whatever system in place was like, basically broken.
So I was like, I'm gonna go fix this.
I had, like, no idea where emoji came from, but I was like a woman on a mission to define herself for dumpling emoji.
So I was like, Who controls Emoji?
Knew nothing about it.
But, you know, if you Google and very quickly, you get to the website and I did of the Unicode Consortium, which is a nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, California, who has Ah.
At that point, I discovered 12 full voting members, nine of which were U S multinational tech companies.
So this was in late 2005 when I started going down the rabbit hole.
So these companies the nine where things like Oracle and IBM and Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo Of the three that were not U s multinational tech companies, but they were German company ASAP, the Chinese company Cua way, which no one had heard of back then.
But like a lot of people have heard of now and then the government of Oman, right, so these were These were the 12 full voting members who paid $18,000 a year to vote on emoji.
And I was, like, kind of horrified by this, like, the sort of like, you know, tech took a ball plus Oman.
Um, so So I was, like, very indignant, first of all, and I also discovered, like, $18,000 times like 12 wouldn't take that much money to take overthe code conservative.
But luck leaders like this tiny little loophole, which is that you conjoined as individual for $75?
Uh, no voting, voting power.
But you get to show up at the meetings and you cannot add it to their mental us.
So, you know, I'm like, Okay, you know, like I like, you know, paid my $75 online.
We're using a credit card and, like, became a Unicode member.
Like, join the email And I was like, Okay, I'm on a mission and and so they had They have these meetings, and so, you know, you're an email list and they send out this Ah RSVP request and said, Who's going to come to the next meeting?
It was like in October.
I think we're November.
I looked at my calendar and I was like, I will be in the Bay area at that time.
And I like our escapee back.
I will come.
And I don't completely know what I was expecting.
Um, so essentially, maybe, like, a little congress, Like a very many Congress or something.
But I took my, you know, I got on public transit and actually went to the apple headquarters.
This is in Sunnyvale, and, you know, I don't know.
Maybe I thought was like to be, like, 100 people.
Maybe like the number of people in this room, but sort of like, more neatly organized and sort of, you know, a Nancy Pelosi kind of style like art.
But it is not what I found.
This is the room where people decide these are the people who decide your emoji.
Ah, these were this is a photo from the November 2015.
Um, and it was really weird because first of all, they were super excited to see me because they have.
Most of these people have been working together for like, 25 years.
And, like new people don't just, like, randomly show up and they're like, you know, tell us about yourself.
What brings you here?
We're so happy to see you.
And it totally had the vibe of, like, a new church.
Like, really, really, really nice old white people.
And so the the sort of group, you know, they were basically mostly male, mostly engineers, Um, mostly older.
And, you know, one of them even had a daughter that had made him a shirt that said shadowy emoji overlord.
This is the chair of the Unicode Emoji, some committee, and the president of Unicode, Mark Davis.
So, um, they just sort of word debating about emoji, You know, things like milk.
Should it be, uh, glass of milk?
Should it be a bottle of milk should be a carton of milk.
Cartons are universal, you know?
Then there was, like so, you know, kind of big debate about milk.
And then there was, like, this question about beans, red beans, green beans, black pains like which being should we choose?
And it was like parallel paralysis over the color of being, So there's no being emoji.
If you haven't noticed, there is a glass of milk emoji and I was like, this system is, like, clearly broken and, like, I'm gonna go fix it.
So, um, I created a group.
It's called Imagination, Whose motto is emoji by the people for the people.
So it was me and my friend eating from way back when And, um And then you know, our you know, our motto is more inclusive and representative Emoji, you're starting with a dumpling, which was our mission to begin with.
So, you know, started this campaign.
We're gonna get the dumpling emoji and made a Kickstarter video.
Um, in the dumpling emoji project, I think dumpling emoji.
That work is still alive.
And I think, Okay, does the video work?
And we made this video dumpling that one of the most universal cross cultural feeds in the world.
Georgia Haskin, Callie, Japan s Cosa Korea Has Mandy is Leah's ravioli Poland His burrow g Richard has How many?
Argentina hasn't.
Jewish people have crept left.
China has pot stickers poor and Tibet have Momo's.
Yet somehow, despite the popularity, there was no dumpling emoji in this town and set Is that in motivators for pizza temporal sushi, spaghetti hot dog on their tackles, His Taco Bell Express way need to write this disparity dumplings A global emoji global.
Isn't it time we brought them together?
Oh, yeah, a while.
We're at it.
How about an emoji for Chinese takeout?
So, you know, kind of raised, like I think we raised, like, $12,000 so that we could join the Unicode Consortium.
And so Imagination became a member and wrote I brought my little emoji proposal with a you know, a bunch of us all kind of dumpling lovers together.
And we got it passed in January 2016.
So this is you being with mysterious.
This was and then the other co chair of the emergency committee from Apple who likes who they roll anonymously, an apple, But, uh, there he is.
And, um so these were original set.
So along with dumpling, we did take out box and chopsticks and then fortune cookie.
And to be honest, I don't think Fortune Cookie would have liked gotten in on its own merits.
But on the sort of coat tails of dumpling and take out box and chopsticks, that kind of made it.
And so it took a couple, you know, while the other the ones now in on Apple like very photo.
Realistic like like dumpling.
I have to say, like, totally weird.
Like dead Pacman interpretation of, um, the fortune 50 on I like first, but there's, like no mouth and nothing is like, totally like some kind of dead three dimensional Pac man.
So, you know, it kind of got me into this, like, deep, deep, deep rabbit hole of like, Well, how does an emoji become an emoji And it is actually like a really weird process.
So, you know, First of all, let's say you have an idea, and this was really nice Anyone consuming an emoji rehearsal.
So you have your idea on, then you write a proposal and you submit it to the emoji subcommittee, which kind of talks about it, and sometimes they'll kick it back to you.
Um, you kind of go around and around the circle.
You know, they'll have feedback.
They don't like your design.
They don't think your statistics are good.
It's like, very these meetings were really funny because they're kind of like C span, but like around emoji and, um, the emoji subcommittee, then, uh, you know, at a certain point when it's good.
It'll kick it to the full committee.
Eso factors for inclusion.
Like what kind of things does the committee care about So things you know, it's popular Demand frequently requested, Um, which they, interestingly enough kind of use, like how many times the term appears on, like Google Search or YouTube?
Or for a while there was Instagram hashtagged as a way of, like, measuring demand.
And this is also just like the general disease of like engineers, which is they love to measure things, and and they and we can't be measured.
They sometimes can't value it, and which is kind of interesting because they always want to try to map like the world into, like, metrics.
Um, and no one can have these very extensive debates or whether or not, you know, demand to be measured through, like whether or not the term appears in Google or in YouTube.
But, uh, the kind of pluses for multiple uses it and meetings.
So, like Fox like, it can mean both Fox And, you know, like a kind of like Wiley or sly or an owl can mean like, um can mean, uh, wise or skunk and mean, smelly and then one of the necessary things.
It has to be able to like, kind of appear distinct at little Mogi sizes.
And then there is sometimes a value in terms of like filling a gap or completeness.
For a while there, the only we had hearts for red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, maybe maybe white black.
We didn't have orange.
So then we, um you know, orange really kind of like orange.
The orange heart actually kind of slid in there basically because, like all the other hearts are there.
But like, bizarrely, orange heart was missing.
Factors against emoji inclusion are basically to specific too narrow, so like a very specific kind of dog as visit dogs in general.
Redundant setting a good example.
There was we had a, um, proposal, like one of the turkey cos they wanted a roast turkey, but we already had a live turkey, so we decided, like both of them basically can mean Thanksgiving.
So, like you don't need two forms of turkey cooked and not cooked that we do have two forms of chicken cooked and not cooked.
We have all, actually the whole life cycle of a chicken.
I don't know if you've ever noticed.
We have, like the egg the egg in like a little like, you know, Shel, I'm sorry.
Eggs and the chicken.
A shell checked by itself, full chicken than cooked chicken.
And then, if you really wanted completely also poo at the smiling through that theon and then this is key.
Actually, no logos, brands, deities of celebrity.
So this really confuses people.
They're like, Why can't we get the Coke can Or why can't we get, like, the Nike swish?
And basically, because you can't?
Because there's all kinds of I p issues.
New Davies either.
Sort of like no Buddha know Mohammed No, no, no.
Davies of knickknacks, you know?
And when you hear about like emojis like those are not really emoji.
There's essentially stickers, but that's really key.
Like these.
Once an emoji, always emoji, they kind of look for longevity.
Um and so once it kind of gets out of the subcommittee gets get kicked to the full committee, the full Unico technical committee.
Those were the people that were in the room, and then, uh, three times, four times a year they meet, and then each one of those.
They kind of vote to pass a set of emoji for like, um, provisional or basically candidate their candidates at that point.
And so, you know, four times a year, they kind of, like vote on ones that will become candidates.
And then once a year as a whole, batch, they vote and those get selected for the next year.
So it takes actually pretty hung time.
Um, s O once here, they lock the emoji, and once it's locked, it goes through all the different, like, you know, vendors like Google and Apple.
And they have the star basically adding it into just all the software, all designs, lots of things happened, very.
They keep on telling us it's very, very expensive to get these emerging pass that these were all complete, like companies with billions of dollars on their on their sort of books.
So I don't I'm not super sympathetic when they're like, you know, five more emoji is like, overwhelming for their folks.
So then, ah, those kind of then show up on your phone and laptops for apple.
Um, most of the updates happen in November, like late October November.
I think we just if you guys have updated your IOS devices because they're like apples.
Very persistent in like making you date your device.
You have seen the latest generation for the 2019 emoji.
So that is how it becomes an emoji.
It takes about 18 to 24 months.
So when I first proposed my dumpling emoji you, it was like like my first got my idea in September, like September 2015.
I propose it in January of 2016 and it hit the phone in November ish October ish of 2017.
So very, very long time.
It's a very, very, very, very, very, very long time.
So, you know, imagination like, you know, it was kind of a tongue in cheek thing, you know, just like the whole video thing.
But we kind of like, went on a little crusade to help kind of pass a bunch of inclusive and representative emoji.
So we like to think of ourselves as the voice of the people in the room that matters.
So, um, so one of the interesting things is like, Why does Unicode There's, like, you know, consortium Kobol thing control emojis a part of it is sort of a natural accident of just what Unico does to give you some history.
Um, yeah, they're sort of debates about when emoji started Essentially started in Japan sometime in the late 19 nineties.
You know, there's a soft and collection a doe coma collection, this one to serve the famed kind of like you.
It's all in color.
Um, and Waas introducing 1999 probably created, I think, in 97 super so famous that there they were collected.
This is very funny, as in the Museum of Modern Art collected the emoji as part of their permanent collection, which is of course, very strange if you think about it because they're just images.
So there's nothing to do, something to collect or told, but from a museum perspective, it actually a lot of collecting of digital property has a lot to do with, um, I p writes and be able to re parade and create them.
You know, all kinds of stuff.
So what happened then was in about 2007 so emotion were incredibly popular in Japan.
And at a certain point, um, you know all the phones and all across all the different carriers have their own little versions of emoji.
And then what happened was she males landed basically in Japan, and people would wouldn't, you know, send their emoji using she male on their phones.
But of course, Gmail couldn't capture um Emojis because these were just proprietary system.
So you would like, have this kind of weird situation.
We're like the symbols would get lost as you kind of moved between, you know, email and the phones.
And then, of course, in all the phones have their different versions.
And so, um, essentially Google and some others kind of went to Unicode and said, Can you please help us kind of coordinate this?
Because, essentially, what is unique codes mission.
The sometimes gets lost in all the late night television shows.
But Unicode has a very interesting commission is to enable everyone speaking every language on the earth to be able to use your language on their computers smartphones.
And they, um, you know, basically see it as a form of human right, because if you cannot communicate with your language in the digital era and essentially will become extinct.
So, um, it's kind of interesting because, you know, they started with, you know, back in way back when with, like, encoding like Russian and Arabic.
And, you know, the second generation was like Chinese or little bit Chinese, Japanese and Korean were a little harder and then kind of like worked on their way down.
You got to like higher Cliff IX.
Now they're basically at a lot of minority languages, Um, and sometimes like dead languages right now.
So they have three main projects.
This is kind of key.
I know that everyone pays attention, Emoji.
That's kind of what I kind of came down the rabbit hole with.
So they encode characters, including emoji.
Now they're over 100,000 characters encoded.
Um, that's like what everyone is news and four.
But from a practical perspective, if you are a commuter science person, they actually have to do other things that were important today of localization.
Resource is which is known as the common look how data repositories, also known as C L d r.
So that tells you, like, you know, does a month in this country Does the date format work, you know?
Month, month, year, month, one date?
Mm D d y Y Y y Or is it like you know, D D Mm.
What you know, Or is it the 24 hour clock?
Where is if he knows?
So all kinds of locality information gets stored in these sort of look alike lies resources, including all the various names for the emoji in the various different languages.
They also have programming languages, programming libraries to do all of this stuff on.
That's called the international components for Unicode or I see you and say what's really funny is C L d r is the name.
This is what they call it.
Most people like you don't even know I had a ghoul to figure out with.
The whole name is because we just call it C l d r and so very funny, I guess like some guy's girlfriend or something misheard c l d r.
And so she was like, What's the seal dear?
And so she made him a little seal dear.
For one thing, this is, like, very operated on this poor stuffed animal had all kinds of surgery that are like, really trump problematic.
So he you know, she made him a little seal dear.
Um, and this has become a sort of unofficial mascot of like, that part of Unicode.
Um, so you know, they introduced Ah.
So they started the proposal in 2007.
It actually took into 2010 to introduced a first generation of emoji Unicode.
6.0, they just, like, had a bunch of emoji including, you know, one of our lovely think poo emoji smiling poop.
Emoji is among is among the So they basically took all of the, um, you know, different versions of the emoji from the German carriers and basically tried to reconcile them, not all of which worked like completely reconcilable but like whatever.
So, like, one of the weird examples is one Japanese carrier had, like, women with bunny years as, like, a portrait shots or just one woman.
And I was sort of, I think, on the android side, then separately on whoever Apple was working with had, like, two women and money in 20 years, like total full body.
So, like clearly bunny years, important Japan.
But those those got matched to each other, even though they're obviously very different when you send them back and forth, but whatever.
So these were the original ones.
Um, and what is the account is in coding work.
So, basically, for those of you who may remember one of the first lectures I don't.
David sent me his lecture notes, but, you know, it's basically a unit code.
Code point is a unique number assigned to each Unicode character.
So each character gets one little piece of Unicode real estate.
You know, this face with tears of joy with tears, tears of joy.
Uh, this is its little Unicode like code point.
Um, if you and you know Hexi decimal of you translated Hexi Decimal ends up being this number, and we translate into binary looks like that number.
So those are all the same, uh, as a kind of, like move through whatever.
Like part sir is interpreting Holly Moochie.
So, you know, the kind of land in 2010 and I don't know if you talk to the original emoji propose er's, they don't necessarily think anything big was gonna happen in code.
Kind of like characters all the time, right?
Like little, you know, like poker.
Like for when you play cards.
And when you play chess, they wingding.
So it wasn't like that big a deal to just add this sort of set of images into the new code library.
But then Apple decided to kind of basically put a keyboard, um, emerging keyboard onto our phones.
And then suddenly you can see you kind of basically see where, like, Emoji was kind of hanging out.
And then IOS decided to add, uh, you know, they were making keyboard more accessible with emoji and then put football.
And there goes that is the rising popularity of emoji all the time.
So again, anyone consume it to ah Thio Unicode docks emit Unico Network My friend Rick Kind of overseas.
That is a very funny account to get things that so you know, kind of proposals we've helped pass.
This is where you whom 80 who is, um who is a 15 year old girl when she decided she wanted to be job emoji.
And so she wrote in and we helped she actually got into Harvard.
But true stamps Stanford.
But we will forgive her for that.
So she's now at Stanford, and I said, as I say, like, you can come to the Unicode meetings now on the ones that happened on a quarterly basis.
Um, so that was her original proposal when it first came over and I was troop recited.
Then there was I have a group of friends in Argentina really?
Were went all out for the Mata emoji, which actually just showed up.
I think I should have showed up on your, um, phones this year.
I mean, they were This is like national news, like the largest or not the largest.
But like the most prestigious paper, La Nacion in Buenos Aires in Argentina had a full page Sunday article about their like campaign for the mouthy emoji.
I'm very weirdly we also had this group.
It's sort of a girl's advocacy group that wanted a menstruation emoji, which I get I get.
But of course, they like proposed bloody underwear, which is like a terrible emoji for all kinds of reasons.
So I was like, uh and so we convince him to do blood drops so that you know, menstruation You could moon and blood drop calendar and a blood drop.
We even got them sort of briefs and up blood drop.
So, like I said, who can provide emoji all kinds of people so skin tones.
You know, those were what wonderful skin zones that you see, That kind of changed emoji everywhere.
Those were actual proposed by, ah, mom out of Texas named Katrina parent.
Uh, just a mom like her daughter came home one day and was like, You know, I'd really like to see myself represented an emoji, and then her mom was like, That's great, Honey, what's an emoji?
You know?
And when she found out, she works in procurement.
So I think she worked for NASA, and and so, like, she can handle paperwork like she can handle bureaucracies to Ah, lot of that goes to your credit, a woman named Katrina parent like that.
This is not like, you know, the white men and the white nerdy men in the room in in a Mountain view or Sunnyvale coming up with skin tones.
So women's flat shoe.
If you guys have have seen this but ballet flat, that was her reaction by, um, from a mom of For Out.
And actually wait, Listen.
The person who also worked on that also got one piece bathing suit because she's really bothered by the fact the only form of skin.
Where was you know?
It's a bitsy teenie polka dot yellow polka dot bikini.
Um, like, obviously like, weirdly, overtly sexualized.
And so it was actually done by a mom of, like, three now four girls.
So when I met her, she had three.
Now she has four when she had spent many, many years pregnant and breastfeeding was like not wearing heels.
And so up until that point, all the heels on the keyboard starts all the shoes, women's shoes all had heels, right?
Samuel said.
Heels, Boot said, heals everything in heels.
Stilettos had heels.
So, um, that is now we can we have her think she got a lot of press out of.
In Parker, she is appear in person and just like random people, there's like this German who wanted, like, you know, what we call the Kobe Air emoji like, you know?
So he, like, wrote it in, you know, on late tech, and like it got passed.
Then governments, we have the actually, literally the finished equivalent of the State Department proposed asana emoji, which is like, terrible like first of all, these things are very, very sad.
Naked people with club feet um so is from yes, it was a ministry for foreign affair.
So they proposed this.
We kind of helped shape it into, like, maybe a little bit like Mork clear and was, you know, the women's with the spoon and then wearing a towel, but more modest, but like, very bizarrely in a translation of, like, telephone, which is emoji.
It just basically became person in a steamy room.
So I don't Have you seen these, like, person coming out of a shower?
Essentially, that was originally So this is the morphing thing that happened in the sort of hole Unicode proposal games.
Um, so, um, you know, one you know, why do I care about emoji?
So one of the reasons I grew up speaking Chinese is Ah, and that gives you a very interesting perspective on emoji, right?
Because, you know, if you think about it like in some ways, Chinese are the original form of emoji along with higher Cliff IX, you know, and these air, these are actually a fire.
This is like fire way back when as a modern fire character.
And then, of course, the fire emoji, this is mouth.
If there's you know, looks very mouth like there's tree or wood and then moon and then son, right, These are all you can kind of see this universality of objects that have been depicted.
Um, both, you know, you know whether or not the Shang Dynasty or now in form of like, colorful little cliffs on your iPhone and what's kind, really fun about, Like, Chinese characters you can, like, start mixing and matching all the little things.
So, for example, you have two trees.
You basically have a forest.
Looks that all you know, Um, if you take Ming this character, this is basically take a sun and a moon together, and it basically means right, Um, but you get more fun, like so here is any kind of liken See the psychology of a culture.
So this is basically a roof with a pig so that that lower creatures a pig, it's a roof.
So you're like, Oh, maybe it's like a farm.
Maybe, you know, or like, a partner.
But no, this actually means job means home.
This is your family.
So basically, home is where your pigs are, which I think says a lot about China at that time.
So another fun 10 super fun.
So this character radical means woman or girl And you could, you know, maybe it's like like she's, like, curtsying or like, whatever.
So I'll use all kinds of ways in in Chinese characters.
So this is my favorite one again.
We have the roof, we have the woman.
So you're like, Oh, we're friend Woman, like, maybe means Homer means family, right?
Like, you know, but actually, no, it actually means, um piece.
So on means peace.
So, like, things are a piece when the woman is under a roof at home, huh?
Or whatever.
So, uh, you know, very similarly you had the woman You have a kid or boy, Depending, baby boy, if you put all this together, you're like, Oh, maybe that also means family.
But no, it means good.
So our standard for good is a woman with a baby boy, Um, s O that all kinds of like issues about that, um, and all kinds of combinations is radical shows up in Chinese.
So what are three women together?
Means evil or wicked.
Um so very like Macbeth e.
Like whenever you know, this character means greedy.
This character means slave.
This character means generalists.
Ah, this character means, like to portray or adultery.
I mean, very loosely interpreted in the adultery.
So you're like, Oh, you know, like growing up as, like, your little six year old learning your characters.
Not like the adultery character at that point.
But, you know, you're like, this is, you know, kind of subliminally kind of sending all kinds of messages to my little like, you know, developing brain.
But they're all There were also all kinds of issues with emerging that way.
Right?
So until 2016 there are many ways you could be a man in a job on your magic keyboard community policeman.
You could be detective.
Could be Buckingham Palace guard.
You can be Santa Claus.
You'd be Santa Claus.
All kinds of colors to give you Santa Claus.
But until 20 15 or 2016 there were only four things you could be as a woman on the emergency board.
So they were Princess, bride, dancer and Playboy Bunny.
So those were those were our jobs, right?
Still like clearly, like all kinds of issues off Japan, like whatever this is like, so problematic and, um So what's interesting is we can now talk about the power of combining emoji.
So it turns out a lot of the emerging your keyboard actually aren't assigned code points.
They're actually like a bunch of emoji kind of squished together.
So skin tones are one of those examples.
Like sometimes have you send something thio, an old like someone with an old phone Or sometimes like Gmail?
You'll see like emoji start breaking apart, Um, so you'll get so essentially their their skin tones.
But they're usually the yellow person with, like, a little square after it, based on the Fitzpatrick scale of skin tones, which kind of has to do with skin cancer, very oddly.
But, um, we also have this idea was Witch, which stands for zero with Joyner.
Very interestingly, kind of mostly used in like languages like Arabic, where you want us kind of glue characters together.
Sometimes you'll see them in English, where you have, um, like an F in a L.
And they're kind of glued into a very nice like ligature.
That kind of invisible F illness is often sometimes zero with Joyner, so we glue things altogether.
You put rainbow in a flag and you get a rainbow flag.
Actually, this actually think the other way around.
It's a flag on a rainbow rainbow flag.
Um, and actually, a lot of the women that way, like, worked really hard.
Google gets a lot of credit for this.
Um, these occupations are often times almost always actually a female character or male character, plus something after it.
So the astronaut is ah, woman plus the spaceship, you know, And then the I'm the doctor for not the doctor.
The chef is like a woman.
Plus, like I think the front, I think, is a frying egg.
So those air creation of these, like these wiggy, the edginess of farmer food service education, all of these I like the ones with a laptop that was like, really fun.
I have a lot of people who use not in there like Twitter handle or instagram handle.
Um, the other really interesting thing I'm very proud of this is if you guys have updated your phones and you have iPhones, you'll notice suddenly you can have, like interracial, multiracial people holding hands at this point, and those are also is, Would you care very.
There's a lot of characters going on, like when you're creating, creating, um, the people holding hands.
Um, let's get this.
So we actually had worked with tender yes, tender to do a proposal on interracial couple of energy, which was super fun.
And they care, in part because I think studies have shown that, like, real studies like academic studies, not just like, you know, Mark in the study is that as online dating appears in the community, the rates of interracial marriage go up.
So they're like, they're like, Oh, um And so now I think it's very cute.
There's a new interface we're very interested to see.
They're like a common Victoria.
Explosion of all of these creatures is, like, very, very high.
So So I was I was really excited to see how they did that, um, baked in ad.
Oh, no.
Okay, there was a full page ad in The New York Times somewhere, but I must have, like, cut that out in my sides.
Well, um so for imagination here, So the sample of some of the motor we've done this doesn't include the most recent ones because I have not updated my Mac os.
So, um, some of the ones that you've seen, like the modern day emoji and the blood drop or not on here, but it gives you a sense of, like, the fun that we have.
We did a whole bunch with G e the science emoji like DNA and new Petri dish and microbe.
I'm very proud of like the toilet paper Emoji, my friend.
Super excited about that lobster.
We got the we actually very strong, supportive letter from Senator Angus King on behalf of the lobster, especially given to the other crew spatial kind of representation.
It was already on the keyboard through crabs and shrimp.
That lobster also needed to be representative bagel.
That was like my way of saying like, Jewish without, like this served even, um, on behalf of my Jewish friends on these were some of the people who have contributed who, which is very different than the room that you saw in the beginning.
So it's super fun.
You can join us on our slack, and then you just sort of some interesting stats with this month make last month last month, um, you could actually released for the first time um, the frequency of use.
So this is it's really funny.
It's kind of interesting, says like it's like tear and it's in log to which of those very unique.
So So in theory, like the, you know, the ones and one or used half as much as the ones in level zero and then to half assed Muchas ones and level one doesn't that go all the way down?
And so one of the most fascinating thing that I do not know how this is possible but essentially faces with tears of joy by itself is like 10% of all emoji usage.
According So you can see it goes from face with tears of joy.
Then the heart is really big, hard eyes, then laughing so and then hands.
And then it just kind of goes all the way down.
Um, it's really fun.
You definitely were kind of looking because it makes you, like, wonder a little bit about like like who?
And wire people using all these energy.
So it is a sort of question like What is the future of emoji?
Unicode doesn't want to be he In the world of regulating emoji, it's like not really what it's designed to be doing.
Um, So I have a friend who is a professor at Stanford who is pushing, you know, he thinks is a terrible idea for Unicode to be regulating.
And he had me, you know, because I always like to see my name in late.
Like, um, did her propose something back in 2016 which is the idea that maybe the encoding should not be kind of managed by central regulatory body.
But instead, you know you for the little images, you do a hash and then, you know, standard hash, and then the, you know, that generates and sequence of numbers.
And then you look at those that sequence of numbers and you pass that back and forth.
Um, of course.
Then you need a central pottery.
What those numbers are.
Yeah, whatever.
So then there's another one.
Ah, that we just introduced this year.
Mark did this, which is very interesting, actually.
I don't know if this will fly.
I do find it very interesting.
It's basically using what are known as Q I d numbers, which I do not know were the numbering system that's used in Wikipedia.
So everything in Wikipedia apparently has is like numbered.
Andi has a Q I D number, and what that does is it kind of unites things like there's one Barack Obama page, right?
But there's one Barack Obama Q I D.
But he has pages in, like Spanish and Russian and Chinese and Indonesian and whatever.
So So it kind of all reconciled is very funny, cause I think, like one is like the universe and like to is Earth like they were very, very methodical.
And in life there's a sense of humor in terms of numbering things.
So one thing would be to you.
Can we use thes Q.
I D numbers that Aaron the Wikipedia numbering system as a way of sort of, um, flexibly but standardized, way of, like, encoding things back for I don't know.
I hear I think our friends, our Facebook or suitably or what's up?
Folks are kind of like not into this idea, but I think it's really interesting.
Um, and then, you know, what emoji are we working on?
If you have questions, all I'll tell you and then that way at all, so you can reach me at like Jenny an emoji Conduct Co are Jenny and imagination or those were the same.
And I'm how am I in time?
I'm good.
And if you really wanted we wanted.
But we can also play emoji spelling bee later, which is sort of my my way.
I just did a hope to my first emoji spelling bee in Hong Kong, which is super fun.
They can teach you guys how to play.
So Q Q and A.
Yes, No done.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
I don't like people.
So are there questions we could play Emojis building me?
If not, yes, How implementation rooms might be specific vs is like creating a common in Tory's.
Is that something?
Yeah.
Okay, so the question is like, How did the vendors were?
The different platforms do their thing independently of like what you Niko tells him to do.
Um, so Unicode is someone, you know, Conan codes like, um, bagel emoji.
It's equivalent of encoding, like a capital letter B.
Right.
So it doesn't actually say what the B should look like.
It gives a guidance image, but then, like, the platforms weren't often do like kind of what?
That whatever they want to do.
And sometimes that causes all kinds of issues because, like sometimes it's facing left sometimes is facing right.
Sometimes it's an animal's head, sometimes of the animal's body, Um, and so that has caused much annoyance everywhere.
And so there is sort of an effort to coordinate behind this.
The designers have their own little mailing list so that they can coordinate, Um, and at least have some consistency.
So this was an issue Ms Recently with Razor was the thing that was passed, and the original image was a straight edge rager razor, which I was like, and it's like not super gender inclusive.
So we we were pushing them to do the plastic razor.
I don't recall, but you know, like the kind that you can both like using your face and then you use on your legs.
You know, one of the most famous examples of like, one platform going rogue is when Apple decided to take the gun emoji and make it into a squirt gun.
And, of course, confusing.
Like everything everywhere for a while.
Ah, but very interestingly enough, like all the other problems moved to, um, the Children's gun emoji as well.
And so it's kind of interesting, because in some ways you can see that the platforms, what they want or decide is like okay or not.
Okay, kind of can get through.
So, like marijuana, emoji or cannabis, Lee from OSHA would probably have had, like, 5 to 7 proposals, some of them very good, you know, kind of hits a lot of, uh, you know, the factors, like distinct shape doesn't have a meaning, is it?
Probably demand.
Yes, Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And everyone's like like, we're not gonna do this one, you know, And, uh, because they're all, like one of her family friendly cos er who have, like, vested interests, like all around the world, Um, including cultures that are much more conservative.
So one little fun fact is many of the alcohol emerging or not, Actually, the alcohol they are the container for the alcohol.
So it's a wine glass.
Emoji is not a wine.
Emoji this beer mug emoji, not beer.
And that was sort of down out of concern of the of Of like that the Muslim countries might, like, have an issue.
I don't think they actually did.
I think was just done proactively as a concern.
So, um, I have my own personal example of something going rogue.
For a long time we had the dumpling emoji, and we specifically gave the image being like of empanada and paro gi ish, you know, sort of like the crescent shape.
And then, like Facebook, randomly did like a shallow bow, like a soup dumpling style.
And the little round one which, like by itself, like, even though the guidance of marriage was not that even though, like the keywords included, like empanada and paro G, it was, I literally think it was like some Facebook designer who, like, went rogue because they like soup dumplings.
And I actually spent so much time lobbying each and every, like, Facebook person in the, like, emoji hire car trying to get them to switch.
And they finally did so that was my little, like, impacted.
Trying to get the consistency of all the, um, those images together.
More questions.
Yes.
So it seems like you're talking about.
Yeah, you should.
You should know.
I don't know how old your phone is, but you should.
You should have, like, years really that long.
Well, dumpling came in 2017.
So I will find you your dumpling on your wife.
I know.
I know.
For WhatsApp does have its own.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
Whatever it lights, one is Britt likes and sometimes they need.
Yeah, so?
So you will have very different versions of, um, emoji, depending on the platform.
So good examples.
Twitter.
Uh, there's Twitter, web, emoji, Twitter Web is actually sometimes the first time the first of the first to market because they could just roll it out on the web and that those were override whatever operating system you generally you're sitting on, um, you know, that being said the I think a long time apple use Facebook used to just default to the local operating system.
And then for a bunch of, like, competitive reasons and consistency reasons across, like, around the world, they wanted their own set of emoji, and they override whatever the local operating system is by, um, in so yeah, like, that's why all the more important that they should be at least somewhat consistent in there.
Look on.
What's that?
What's happens?
Kind of interesting.
They're the most rogue of all of the, uh, the platform says they'll just, like, kind of go out there and do something.
So they were the first to implement both Texas flag emoji, you know?
And then, um and then a transgender flag.
Emoji.
So which is nice, because it was like, this big debate about liking the transgender flag.
Is it really the A stable flag?
Even that's less than 20 years old.
And, like, you know, whats app was like, we're just gonna do it.
And so they just they just introduced it and all It forced the hand of all the other operators.
And, um, so I give what's up?
I don't know who they are, you know, whatever.
Like little rogue emoji, um, kind of posse there is inside the organization, but I give him credit for being like, fearless and like, going out there on that.
But yes, all they vary.
It's like and it just kind depends on you know what?
What, uh, what setting the apse have in terms of overriding?
Yes.
This is the committee bowties double not intended devoted.
That's like Pointer.
Yeah.
What does it mean?
I don't know.
Oh, but there just is a middle finger.
Yes, There is a middle finger, emoji.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks to Michael.
Thanks to the Irish contingent on the International standards organization, that guy who passed it also is the one who came gave us the walk in hands of the Vulcan signal.
Um, the So the more general question is, how How conscious is the committee of things with a double on Sandra, They can be as conscious as they can be, given that there we skew like older white engineers.
Plus now a smattering of like, Asian women who like you and like what?
Well, like younger white women who are on the design part of the committee.
Like sometimes we don't know literally.
I remember the headlines coming out, like, earlier this year, and it was like Unicode has passed a tiny Penis emotion.
And I was like, What the hell are they talking about?
I was literally anything like oyster like, what did we pass?
And it turns out that they're well past this thing that was like like like pinching or not pinching.
But it's like, you know, very small thing.
And, like, I honest like that came up zero in any into deliberations like wi I I saw, you know, like I emailed the list and I was like, Just goes to show, like, kinds of, you know, you never anticipate.
Like, what?
People, Uh, well, taken emoji to mean, like, right now, Like, uh, from what I hear White, sir, what I hear milk is now being used as a symbol for like, white nationalism.
Like that was also kind of unexpected.
So in some ways, what's wonderful about languages that it evolves and dynamic and his grassroots up, And it shouldn't be controlled by likely know, too.
Centralized posse in Silicon Valley.
Um, but, you know, way our conscious about, like, ce