On August 8, 2015, my friend Yiying Lu was using the Messages app on her iPhone to chat with another friend of hers, Jennifer 8. Lee, about their plans to get together in San Francisco for a meal of Chinese dumplings. Lu wanted to express her excitement by sending Lee a message incorporating the dumpling emoji–until she realized that there wasn’t a dumpling emoji.
Nothing remarkable about that. People have been discovering that emoji they want to use don’t exist ever since the first set of 180 such icons debuted in Japan nearly two decades ago. But Lu is a graphic artist whose primary passion is creating work that melds the worlds of art and tech, a goal that brought her from Shanghai to San Francisco by way of Sydney. She’s done work for clients such as Disney, Pepsi, and Expedia and is the creator of the drawing that became Twitter’s Failwhale. And so her instinct, when she discovered the tragic absence of a dumpling emoji, was that it was a problem to be solved.
Lu quickly cranked out an emoji-style image of a dumpling–an anthropomorphic one, with blinking hearts for eyes, rosy cheeks, and a broad smile. She messaged it to Lee–a writer, producer, entrepreneur, and former New York Times journalist–who, Lu says, was instantly smitten and asked, “Did you make this? Can I tweet about it? We should do something with it. We should let other people use it, too.”
That impulsive reaction turned into a unlikely goal: to make a dumpling emoji available to everybody. It was an ambitious undertaking given that all Lu and Lee knew about emoji , at first, was that they were there. “‘Where do emoji come from?'” Lee recalls asking herself. “I had no idea.”
Lu and Lee went on to accomplish their mission, but it took plenty of time and effort. In March 2017, the Unicode Consortium, the industry group responsible for the consistent encoding and display of textual characters of all sorts–including emoji–formally announced Emoji Version 5.0. Among its 56 new icons is a dumpling. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have created their own versions, all of which are now available; Apple will presumably add one to iOS as part of its next emoji update, which it’s teasing for later this year.
Along the way, Lu and Lee also began thinking of the quest as involving a greater cause. Millions around the world use emoji to communicate, but only representatives of 17 full, institutional, and associate member organizations of the Unicode Consortium get to vote on new ones. Wouldn’t this picture language be richer and more relevant to more people if a wider swath of humanity had a say in choosing new ones? That democratization has begun to happen–thanks in part to the efforts of these two dumpling-loving friends.
