The Original Emoji Are in the Museum of Modern Art
Zusammenfassung
The original set of 176 emoji, designed by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet platform in 1999, is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. MoMA acquired the set in 2016, describing it as “a brilliant example of interface design.” Each emoji was a 12×12-pixel image designed to convey information compactly on mobile screens with severe display limitations. The set included weather symbols, transport icons, clocks, phases of the moon, and 45 faces — the precursors of the Unicode emoji system used by over 3.3 billion smartphones today.
The Design Problem
In 1998-1999, Shigetaka Kurita was part of the NTT DoCoMo team developing i-mode — Japan’s first mobile internet service. The service allowed subscribers to send and receive email and browse web content on their mobile phones. The display constraints were severe: screens were small, typically 128×128 pixels, and bandwidth was limited.
The challenge: how to convey information efficiently in this constrained medium? Scrolling through text to find weather information took time and screen space. A single 12×12-pixel weather symbol could convey “cloudy” instantly. Kurita’s insight was that visual symbols could replace words efficiently in messaging contexts — and that emotional nuance (the reason people added emoticon sequences like “:)” to their messages) deserved dedicated graphical representation.
He designed 176 symbols drawing on manga (Japanese comics) visual vocabulary, road signs, and standard symbols. The designs were 12×12 pixels — 144 pixels total — requiring careful decisions about what information to encode at that resolution.
The MoMA Acquisition
MoMA’s acquisition of the emoji set in 2016 was controversial in some quarters. The museum justified the acquisition:
“The NTT DOCOMO emoji have a strong claim to being the origin of a wholly new form of communication, one that continues to evolve rapidly. As emoji have permeated global culture, they have increasingly become part of everyday speech.”
The acquisition is part of MoMA’s collection of works in “Architecture and Design” — the same category as Dieter Rams’s Braun products and the original Apple Macintosh. MoMA’s framing of emoji as a design achievement (not as “art” in a traditional sense) reflects the museum’s long-standing interest in industrial and interactive design as cultural artifacts.
The Unicode Expansion
Kurita’s 176 symbols became the seed of a global standard. Apple included emoji in iPhone OS 2.2 (2008), initially only accessible in Japan. When American users discovered them through carrier unlocking tricks, demand for official US support prompted Apple to enable them globally in iOS 5 (2011). Google followed with Android.
Unicode Consortium accepted emoji as a formal character standard, mapping them to Unicode code points. This allowed cross-platform compatibility — the same emoji code point renders a face on iPhone, Android, and Windows, though each platform’s visual design differs.
The Unicode emoji set grew from 176 to over 3,600 by 2024, with additions governed by a formal proposal process through the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode and UTF-8 article covers the technical infrastructure that makes this standardization possible.