A Provocation for Rethinking and Democratising Emoji Design

Use of emoji is now pervasive in all manner of online messaging and communication. We review how emoji are selected for inclusion in the widely-accepted Unicode Standard and argue that end users are insufficiently engaged in this design process. We argue that this is a timely topic for discussion and call for suggestions to democratise methods for emoji design and selection. As an example we propose our own online platform for emoji co-design and argue that a design approach that engages with user communities more will result in emoji that are flexible across languages and cultures, and are used more frequently