Hi everyone, welcome to the A6&Z podcast. I'm Sonal. This week we're resurfacing one of our favorite episodes of all time, all about emojis. It's timely not just because the whole new set of emojis are about to hit many people's phones soon, but because the episode, which was actually first recorded in 2015, is really an evergreen and broader conversation about how innovation comes about,

because we cover the tension between open standards versus clothes and proprietary systems,

the economics of creativity, the governance and politics of design, and much more.

We began with the brief tour of different emoji and how they came about,

where emoji fit in the taxonomy of visual and social

communication, and why that matters, especially when it comes to machines reading emotions.

And finally, we talk about the ambiguities and difficulties to translating emoji when it's not

really meant to be a language. Our guests are Fred Benenson, who was the second employee

at Kickstarter and VP of their

data. He also famously kickstarted a project to translate Moby Dick entirely into emoji, and

Jenny 8-Lee, former New York Times reporter who was a member and is now vice chair of the Unicode

emoji subcommittee. She first led the effort to get the dumpling emoji, which is where we briefly start

this conversation.

I wasn't a really big emoji user.

In fact, the first time I ever heard of emoji was when Fred started his Kickstarter called

emoji dick.

And I was like, what the fuck are emoji?

This is before they showed up on our iPhones, like perky little yellow faces.

I was like, what? It's like sounds something very bizarre. I just started. I didn't even actually

just be blunt. I had a very hard time using emoji because I didn't quite understand how to even

frankly use that moment. I don't understand it when people send it to me. if it's not the obvious heart, you know, et cetera. But as I've been using it more,

I found myself sort of expressing myself now in kind of quirky ways. And I don't know if people really

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