99% Invisible - 272- Person in Lotus Position

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution pixelated images from Japan, have become a well-established and graphically sophisticated part of everyday global communication. But who decides what emojis are available to users, and who makes the actual designs? Independent radio and film producer Mark Bramhill (Welcome to Macintosh) took it upon himself to find out and, in the process, ended up developing and pitching his own idea for a new emoji. Person in Lotus Position

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Okay, just gonna record. Okay. And that is producer Mark Bramhill recording himself. It is Monday, November 7th, 2016. So what's happening here? Where are you? What is going on in this tape? Uh, so I was getting ready to go to IBM's headquarters in San Jose, California. I was going to give this presentation to about 20 people.

I am way more nervous than I thought I would be, but it's happening. So I'm just going to practice running through the little plan script I have. So tell us what this presentation is about. So I was getting ready to make a presentation for something that if it was approved, would be used by millions of people all around the world. It would change every last cell phone, tablet, and laptop all around the world. All right, I'm sold, what is it? Okay, so it was a proposal for a brand new emoji.

You know, those little pictograms we used to text each other, the thumbs up, the woman dancing, or the little yellow faces, that smile or wink or they wear sunglasses. Okay, I know what an emoji is, Mark G, so I'm not that old Okay, okay, you can do this you can do this You sound so nervous. I know it's really really embarrassing

Okay, I'll let you know how it goes Okay, so before you tell us what your emoji was and what they got approved, I feel like we should start with something like... Why am I doing this whole thing? Exactly. Why are you doing this whole thing? Right, so creating an emoji, it was not something that I actually planned on doing. But you do cover this stuff. You have a podcast called Welcome to Macintosh.

You cover things like the intersection of tech and culture, and so this seems to be part of your beat. Exactly. And, you know, I think emoji, they're kind of right at that intersection. They've become this really interesting part of the way that we communicate. They're this kind of universally spoken language of pictures. But going into all this, I didn't really know that much about emoji. So I reached out to Jeremy Burge. He's the creator of Emojapedia.

My job is keeping on top of any new emojis and sort of documenting how they change over time. So for a real quick sort of history lesson on emoji, they started in Japan in the 90s. The first set of emojis was designed for a Japanese cell phone company by this guy named Shikotaka Kurita in 1998. When texting was still really new, there was only 176 of them, and they were 12 by 12 pixels each.

So that's really low res for an emoji, that's super low res? Yeah, but these were like the first images that could be sent via text message before photos or anything like that. If you see the Japanese ones, they've borderline no resemblance to what we see today. They're sort of very basic abstract pixel art.

So these super low res emojis became really popular in Japan. And quickly, almost all Japanese text messages became dotted with these cute little pictures. But they were still only available on Japanese cell phones. And depending on which carrier people in Japan were using, these emojis could be different from phone to phone. I might send you the hamburger and you might get the poo. That's a problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like in our modern world of computers, this should not be happening. Right, but the reason that this was happening was that when different cell carriers in Japan added these images for their customers, they encoded them differently. So let me take it just a minute

to explain what a character encoding is. This is Mark Davis. Every time you see a character on the screen, on your mobile or laptop, it's always represented internally by a number. So there's some number associated with the letter A. So the problem in Japan was that the companies weren't coordinating about what emojis were assigned to what number. So one company might have the hamburger encoded as 46,790, while another carrier would have the poo encoded as 46,790.

So when American cell phone companies decided that they wanted to enter the Japanese market, they knew that they needed the coding for these emojis to become standardized, and they turned to Mark and his organization, a group called the Unicode Consortium. I'm the president of Unicode Consortium. We're people behind the curtains making sure that everything works, kind of like plumbers.

You know, you don't notice them as long as the water keeps flowing. They're doing the 99% invisible work of the internet, if you will. I guess I'll allow it. So the Unicode Consortium had already been working on standardization for a while. Not with emoji, but with text. The consortium was founded back in the early days of the internet when there was no universal standard for encoding text or anything else you saw online. People at the time were really used to getting emails

or looking at websites and they would see just jumbled up garbage on the screen because it was the wrong encoding. The internet used to be so ugly. Like when you were a baby, you don't even know. The internet was terrible then. Yeah, I have heard stories. Like, you know, Unicode, they were founded to help with that. Most of their work has to do with

language, you know, making sure that even little-known languages are legible across different websites and platforms. That seems totally fair. That make the worldwide, worldwide. Make sure everyone can be represented. Exactly. And ultimately Unicode became the B all and all text encoding standard. So since people were already relying on Unicode to standardize text encoding They thought well, why don't we get these guys to do emojis for us to yes Yes, yes precisely though when Unicode was first approached about emojis in the early 2000s They weren't interested. They thought that these cute little pictures They're probably a passing fad. I think we were all kind of hoping and praying for that too.

No, Robin. No, emojis are here to stay. And five years later, around 2006, Unicode realized emojis were not going anywhere. So they decided to take on the project of standardizing them. So they looked at all the different emojis that have been created by the Japanese carriers and sorted through them to establish an initial core library. So what was in that original set of emojis? It was kind of a hodgepodge, you know, two camels, four mailboxes, five trains.

We need two camels because you got the one hump and the two hump. Yeah, it's really important. And so once they had that core library, Unicode decided that all additional emojis should be considered very carefully and voted on and approved by Davis and the rest of the consortium. No more two camels slipping through the cracks. Each emoji that we encode, we really have to think,

does this sort of break new ground? Does it go in a new direction? Is it going to be extremely popular? Because we know that faces, for example, are very popular. You know, the hearts are very popular and so on. So we try to weigh all these factors when we pick a set. So these guys really do pick all the emojis that are on my phone, that they are the ones who decide.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So four times a year, Unicode meets to consider all the proposals they have for new emojis, and they are the final say in which ones are approved. And once an emoji is approved, it never goes away. Emoji can only be added. Once an emoji always an emoji, you know? And so who comes up with these new ideas for emojis? Like who gets to submit proposals?

So I had this question too. And I asked Jeremy, the guy from Emojapedia, and this is what turned this story from idol curiosity into a year-long journey for the proposals. Like, who is actually responsible for bringing these emojis into the world? Literally anybody, anyone on the planet, you could send a proposal in right now, and Unicode would look at it, and there's a chance that it could become an actual emoji.

So, like, I could do this. Like, I could send a proposal in. Yes. So, of course, when Jeremy told me that, I knew that I had to submit a proposal for an emoji. Of course. Yeah, of course. What better way to understand the process than to go through it myself? But I didn't really have an idea for what I wanted to propose.

So Jeremy gave me a few basic guidelines to think about. You should be trying to prove there's already demand before you got involved. Don't start a petition and generate demand. He said that Unicode wants people writing proposals to cite evidence of demand, like hashtag usage on Twitter or Instagram, or Google search trends. He also said that my proposed emoji should be visually distinctive. If it looks the same as something else, it doesn't matter if it means something different, emojis about what they look like.

But it can't be too specific, like it can't be for this one really specific kind of dinosaur or whatever. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, it can't be too vague. You know, if your emoji was just dinosaur, you might need more specificity, like T-Rex. Well, it's a pretty fine line, but I think I get it. Okay. Another thing, they don't want to add an emoji that's potentially just a fad. Right, I get that. Okay, another thing, they don't want to add an emoji that's potentially just a fad. Right, I get that. So you don't want an emoji of like a,

I don't like a fidget spinner or something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. fidget spinners, who knows how long those will be around. You also can't submit logos or brands, specific people, deities, et cetera. Superman and Batman, Starbucks, and those are just not going to be included. They have to be generic. So they're already like a few thousand emojis, right? There's 2,666 as a recording, but there you go.

So if you're not going to do Batman and Superman, what doesn't exist yet that you could actually propose? So I actually asked Jeremy this, what do people really really want? And this is what he told me. So there is a yoga, because it's a popular activity that a lot of people around the world do. And if somebody decided to submit yoga and are meditating, I think that would be quite the winner. So I'll be honest, I had never done yoga.

I had never meditated. I had never meditated. I don't have particularly strong feelings about either one. But, I wanted to pitch an emoji, and this had good odds of being approved. So, Nama Steyma. Yeah, yeah, I went full Nama Stey on this. Started doing all kinds of research about yoga and meditation. Did you know, for example, Roman, that there are 35 million Instagram posts with hashtag yoga compared to hashtag running's Paltry 31 million?

Well, clearly that means there has to be an emoji for yoga. Right. What would you use to represent that? So I actually decided to go with an image that I felt represented both meditation and yoga, a person in lotus pose. And that's the one where you said cross-legged and you have your hands face up on each knee, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The sort of famous cross-legged sitting pose, yeah. And so I found some clip art on the internet to illustrate what the emoji might look like.

And in the end, I put together this eight-page proposal to submit to Unicode. I felt pretty good about it, but I wanted to run it by someone who had actually gone through the process. My name is Jennifer E. Lee and I successfully proposed a dumpling emoji. Her middle name is actually the number eight, which is so cool. And she was actually in an episode that we did about fortune cookies and a while back. Yeah, and she actually successfully made a fortune cookie emoji as well. Anyway, back in 2015, when Lee was working on getting the dumpling emoji

added into Unicode, she learns that Unicode is this non-profit, but it is controlled by a small handful of tech companies. You know, at that point, had 11 full voting members, I paid $18,000 a year to vote. So over those 11, eight of them were US multinational tech company. So it's Oracle, IBM, Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Adobe. So there's really eight of the other three. They were the German software company SAP, the Chinese telecom company Huawei and the government of Oman. Did, and the government of Oman. Did she say the government of Oman?

Yeah, because remember, most of what Unicode does has nothing to do with emoji and mostly to do with encoding language on the internet. So the government of Oman is there to advocate for greater Arabic language support on computers. Oh, that makes total sense. Yeah. And now Lee is a part of the emoji subcommittee with Unicode. She can't vote on which emoji get approved, but she is able to help novices like myself navigate

the difficult path to emoji land. So I showed her my proposal. It looks pretty solid. Yes. But I think your emoji characters are a little bit ugly. No. Well, you did use clip art. That's fair, fair.

Probably not the standard of emoji characters, so I don't know where you got them, but you might do them in more of either the Apple style or more of the Google style. She was right. My design was not great. So I ditched these clip art images and hired a professional, a woman named Affie Messer, just so that my case would be stronger. And Unicode would have a better

idea of what this emoji could look like. I polished up my proposal, named it Person Meditating, and submitted it right at the deadline. And then a few weeks later. So I'm just coming into the studio now. I just got an email from Unicode. Let's see, let me load it up. It says, the emoji subcommittee has decided to forward your proposal to the UTC. The document number will be L2-16-279 regards UTC.

Alright! Alright, that's it! Woo! So that sounds like good news, but what does that actually mean? It basically means that I got through the first round, that Unicode was going to hold an official vote on my emoji. And at this point, you know, you can sit back and see what happens, or if you are extra excited, like I was,

you can actually show up to a quarterly meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee and present your proposal in real life. And so that brings us back to you being super nervous before your presentation, back in November. Right. Okay. Pfft. Pff November. Right. OK.

It is Monday, November 7, 2016. And today is the day that I'm presenting to the Unicode Technical Committee. But before we get to that, I want to talk about someone I met while I was there in the Bay Area. She was also there to make a presentation to Unicode. Her name is Raeuf Alumati. My name is Raeuf Alumati. I'm 15 years old. She's 15 years old like in high school and she wrote up one of these proposals like you did.

Yeah, and believe me, this is no small task. I've never written any proposals whatsoever. The closest thing I've done were a lot of reports in science glass. But for Reeve, this whole thing just had a totally different level of importance. You mean that some people do this not just to make a cool radio story out of it? Well, yeah, you know, because emoji is represent culture. And just like it matters to see a representation of your culture in television or movies, seeing yourself in an emoji can feel important in the same way.

I mean, humans all over the world sense something like six billion of these little things to each other every day. Totally, they're everywhere. Yeah, and so in the last five years, Unicode has tried to represent more people by adding characters with a range of different skin tones. They've added some gay characters and a few gender-neutral and

drogenous ones as well. But there was still no one that looked like Reooth because she wears a hijab. I felt like, you know, it would be nice for me to see, have an emoji of myself on the keyboards that I could use. Reooth felt like her emoji would help other women who wear her jobs feel more represented in mainstream culture. Even though it is something small, I think it will, you know, just normalize the hijab.

You'll definitely be definitely be the coolest, like coolest kid that I've ever had. I'd, I like if it does pass, I just told my friends we're good, I have to celebrate, like I'm gonna bring cupcakes of the emoji to school for everybody, even for the teachers. Cause it'd be something so amazing if hopefully it does pass. Well now I'm totally rooting for you.

They can choose more than one robot. You can root for us both. Yeah, but if it's between you and her, it's definitely her. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. So Reu and I were both presenting to Unicode on the same day. Are we presenting it, too? I'm presenting it at 1130.

Okay, so I'll just shoot that. Yeah, yeah. When it was my turn, they made me turn off my microphone. So, I don't have tape of what I said. But basically, I gave a little spiel about why the world was in dire need of a yoga emoji. I got a few laughs, some nodding heads. It lasted about five minutes, and then I took a few questions. After it was over, I stood there, kind of waiting for some indication of whether, you know,

the committee liked it. And did they like it? They wouldn't say. I finally suddenly told me, basically, you need to leave so we can vote. So I left and I just figured that they'd be in touch soon. Okay. Yeah. So if your emoji is approved, then what happens next?

So even though I submitted this really beautiful visual for my person meditating emoji, it's really more just to demonstrate what it could look like. And ultimately, if the emojis approved Google and Facebook and Apple and all the other platforms will get to decide what exactly person meditating looks like in their own platform style. So I talked to someone from Google about this.

My name's Rachel Bean. I'm a creative director at Google on the material design team. But she has another title too. Oh, yes. I am also funnily enough, the creative director of emoji at Google. Once Rachel Bean and her team get the list of new emojis and their codes from Unicode, they'll

design the images to be used on all of Google's Android phones. And what kind of guidance do they get from Unicode about how to draw them, how to make them look? Right, so they don't actually give them all that much. They give them the name of the emoji and a few keywords of things it might represent. You know, occasionally they might give a little bit of guidance of, you know, the bagel emoji, it should be drawn sliced so that people won't confuse it with the donut.

Right. So that makes it so that Google emojis look different from Apple emojis and they look different from Twitter emojis. They're all really different. Exactly. Characters might be facing in a different direction or have different outfits on

or maybe dance in another style, but they should all illustrate the same basic concept. And recently, Rachel being an entertainment Google have redesigned the entire library of Android emojis. For all the emojis that weren't just disembodied faces, the team had to deeply consider all the clothing and accessories that they were wearing. Because they're designing for a global audience. Take, for example, the farmer emoji. clothing and accessories that they were wearing. Because they're designing for a global audience.

Take for example the farmer emoji. Originally we had designed the farmer emoji, very American Gothic style. So, you know, a pitch fork and wearing overalls. But a lot of farmers all around the world, they don't actually use pitch forks. That's kind of an old and very American characterization. And also the overalls to some degree weren't necessarily the outfit that most farmers globally wear.

So we changed the actual prop that the farmer was holding into a grain, so to really put more emphasis on what's grown universally versus tools that may not be universally used. And this kind of global inclusivity is the same stuff they'll have to consider with the emoji that I proposed, you know, of the person meditating. What will it wear? Like, what's the color of the clothing? Is he or she are they going to be wearing leggings, a leotard, a t-shirt? You know, it's good that they're thinking about this, but Gings, Liattard, a T-shirt? You know, it's good that they're thinking about this, but the Google designers are never gonna really be able

to fairly represent all cultures. Right, and Unicode is this governing body with a bunch of representatives, but they're all mostly from these big tech companies. And so this whole system, it kind of irks people. This is not a good system. You shouldn't have to ask these people's permission. This is Keith Winston. I'm Keith Winston.

I'm an assistant professor of computer science here at Stanford. And he says, you know, if there is not an emoji that represents you or your culture, Unicode's process for getting one is not exactly quick. So having to wait, you know, two or three years for it to end up in the standard, and that's a long time. It doesn't take quite that long anymore. It's closer to one or two years. But still, Winston points out that there are already platforms like Slack that let you

take an image and make it emoji sized where you don't need to go through Unicode. Yeah, totally because Kurt Colestead on our staff he does this and he makes a little emoji for every episode and we share it when the episode comes out. And it's just a little picture. It's not really an emoji. Exactly. And so there is no special encoding process required to make them. This is a much simpler way of doing it rather than trying to cram everything into Unicode. And even though I think Winsdine gets at some really important criticisms, if we went to a system where we really just sent tiny pictures, then the thing that I really love about emojis would kind of be lost, which is that they've turned into this sort of

universal standardized language of pictures. Like the idea that some stranger in Argentina and I are both sending a heart-eyes emoji to express love, I think there's something really cool about that. I mean, that is a nice quality to the nothing universal. So what happened with your meditating person? You must know him by now. So for a few days after my presentation, I still hadn't heard anything.

Like no email thanking me for my proposal or letting me know when I'd hear back or anything like that. It was just total radio silence. And then I was just scrolling on Twitter. So I just saw that emojipedia has tweeted about some of the new emoji. Let's see, I'm opening up the page.

Person with a beard, star eyes, zebra giraffe, a hijab emoji past, that's really cool. Not seen, wine. A serious face with symbols covering mouth, face with open mouth, vomiting, ooh, it's person in steamy room, person climbing, person in lotus position for yoga and meditation that's fine. Past. Alright, there we go. So that's it, yours passed.

More importantly, reuse passed, that's so great. Yeah, both of ours were accepted and I am super excited about it as you could probably tell. So they changed the name of mine from person meditating to person in lotus position, you know, Unicode really likes the specificity of these things. And as of now, we're recording in August of 2017. It's not on your phone just yet. But person in lotus position, the hijab emoji and all these new ones should be on your phone

by the end of the year. So when you get the person in lotus position emoji on your phone, you can think of Mark and how he doesn't even like yoga. No, but that's that's the thing. I actually have started doing yoga and meditation. It's one of the many things that came out of doing this story for me. A huge new appreciation of yoga and meditation. Well, that's remarkable. Well, then, Namaste for real, then. Namaste, Roman.

You know that just means hello, right? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha- More emoji talk after these fine people pay for our listening experience. Raise hands. Our female dancing bunnies versus our male dancing bunnies, we made the decision that they're wearing the exact same outfit. Men get the skimpily a tar just like the ladies. Really gender a lot of it is a social construct and if we're trying to be more universal it's sometimes good to eliminate some of the social construct so it doesn't feel super resonant for one culture over another. Yeah also I just have to say that the men in dancing men with bunny ears is one of my favorite emojis at this point but me too. I love that we kept the man wearing a little a little theotard instead of putting shorts on him. That was one of the best moments in my career.

I'm kidding. But I do think it's great. I do think it's a great decision that we made. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Mark Bramhill with Katie Mingle and Avery Trouffleman, mixed in tech production by Sheree Fusef, music by breakmaster cylinder Melodium, Lollatone, and Sean Rihau. Our digital director is Kurt Colstead, the rest of the team includes Seleney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. The story was adapted from Mark's podcast Welcome to Macintosh, where he's currently airing a multi-part series on emoji. It goes a lot deeper than we could fit into these 25 minutes, so if there are things you're still wondering about, you know, emoji-related, they're probably

answered in this series. The first episode is out now. You can find it at Macintosh.fm or wherever you listen to podcasts. And the show has lots of other episodes about design and technology that you beautiful nerds are bound to enjoy. Go check it out. We commissioned original emoji art from Kara Rose DeFavio that tells the complete story of this episode entirely in emoji. You have to see it is at 99pi.org.

And finally, thanks to Rishi Keshe her way for explaining to us on the Illusionist podcast, what Namaste actually means. I heard it. It's a joke. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% invisible is part of radio-topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative

shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and coin carrying listeners just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But our fabulous home on the internet with more design stories than we can ever tell you in audio form is our website at 99PI.org. you