Looking Outwards – 08 – [OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

This week I watched the lecture of Jennifer Daniel, who is an American designer, editor, and illustrator, and she also leads the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium, while working for The New York Times and The New Yorker. What people might not know is that Jennifer initiated the gender-inclusive representation movement for the emoji creation group around the globe that shares the same sets of Unicodes for emojis. Among the new gender-inclusive emojis that she created, Mrs. Claus, Woman in Tuxedo, and Man in Veil are the most famous ones. I admire the movement because I think as we develop, we should make all aspects of our modern technology more inclusive for more and more people, to further facilitate our advances. To do this, she believes that we need more and more emojis that can better represent individuals, thus she and her team developed several emoji-related apps such as Emoji Kitchen. While introducing those emoji-related apps during her lecture, she started with the very core and basic definition and evolutions of emoji, then explained every issue of the emojis that we are using and why we should improve them, eventually demonstrating how her works can solve those problems. I enjoy watching her lecture because of how direct her approach to the topic is and how simple she made her works look to non-programmers.