Examining the "Global" Language of Emojis: Designing for Cultural Representation

Emojis are becoming an increasingly popular mode of communication between individuals worldwide, with researchers claiming them to be a type of "ubiquitous language'' that can span different languages due to its pictorial nature. Our study uses a combination of methods to examine how emojis are adopted and perceived by individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and 45 countries. Our survey and interview findings point to the existence of a cultural gap between user perceptions and the current emoji standard. Using participatory design, we sought to address this gap by designing 40 emojis and conducted another survey to evaluate their acceptability compared to existing Japanese emojis. We also draw on participant observation from a Unicode Consortium meeting on emoji addition. Our analysis leads us to discuss how emojis might be made more inclusive, diverse, and representative of the populations that use them.