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Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji
[As emojis] become more inclusive, each becomes less universal. Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol. "That person could be man, woman, anyone," she says. "But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn't mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture."
While Daniel can't fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female. "We're not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji–and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants," says Daniel. "But you can create something that feels more inclusive."
Google is launching 53 updated, gender ambiguous emoji as part of a beta release for Pixel smartphones this week (they'll come to all Android Q phones later this year). Whether Google calls them "non-binary" or not, they have been designed to live between the existing male and female emoji and recognize gender as a spectrum. Given that Google collaborates with many of its rivals on emoji, it's likely that Apple and others will release their takes on genderless emoji later this year.
Daniel sits on the Unicode consortium–the organization that sets core emoji standards, including signifiers like gender and other details, that designers at Apple, Google, and other companies then follow to create their emoji. Last year, she pointed out that there were 64 emoji that, according to Unicode's standards, were never meant to signify gender. In fact, 11 don't have a Unicode-defined signifier for male or female at all–like baby, kiss, fencing person, and snowboarder. As for the remaining 53, they could be male, female, or neither.
Yet Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and, yes, Google, have often assigned genders with their designs for these emoji. It's why every construction worker across major operating systems is, by default, is a man. Unicode's standards dictated a construction "person," but tech companies decided to design them as construction men (and add women as a secondary option).
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:24PM (11 children)
No, but she made a very specific claim. My response should be read in that context.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @08:08PM (8 children)
It's a stupid claim. Those things aren't expressible with one emoji without previously having trained the reader to understand the meaning. A similar result could be had for defining L to mean love or P to mean peace.
The point of words and written language is that you don't have to train people to understand every single one of them separately and within a given context. You can develop a system where people can take the letters and form words and take those words and form sentences that can be unique or generic.
There's a reason why hierogliphics are a part of so few modern languages. They're a real pain to work with as you're having to frontload a ton of work before you get anywhere. The only reason you see them still in use by the Chinese is that they need to use one writing system for a large number of different languages and the main language itself has so few syllables available that you would run into other issues.
Most languages though have dropped tons and grown enough syllables that it's not necessary to stick with so many different ways of expressing the same syllable in written form.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:46AM (2 children)
Yep. Precisely. It's like the proliferation of icons on buttons in apps all over the place these days. I have no clue what most of them mean. I want to use a mail app to do some obvious function that used to be expressed by a simple word or phrase, but now I have to guess -- does the triangle with the trapezoid and the arrow going left do what I want, or do I want the button with the circle and the arrow going to the square?
Seriously. What the hell. This is my life dealing with almost every freaking app these days, and it's been spreading to desktop software. Many apps don't bother displaying tooltips either, which used to be the way you learned some icon toolbar in saner days.
No, now you're supposed to somehow either guess or Intuit the meaning of hundreds of random symbols. It's like we're going linguistically backwards.
So, a task in a new app that used to take me 5 seconds to find under the right word on a menu or whatever now takes me a minute of guess and check to see what the freaking buttons do... And hope I don't screw something up in the process. And if it's not a common task I use everyday, then next week I get to play the same game.. and the next week... Until eventually I waste maybe 10 minutes over several weeks learning what could have just been made clear with a single English word.
Emojis are the same thing. The peace sign is known to many, but not to all. But everyone who can read English knows what the word "peace" means.
And I suppose that's about the ONLY advantage to emojis and textless icons... It makes it easy for devs to avoid translating into many languages. While making the user experience a pain in the ass.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 12 2019, @05:52PM
The main motivation behind the glyphs you see used in all sorts of modern UIs is to get you to spend (waste) more time using the tool.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 15 2019, @12:50AM
Pretty much any new industrial equipment is like this too. It has a touch screen with a stack of ambiguous icons on it, and you have to look them up in the manual to find out what they do. If it's something that needs actual numeric inputs, they put them all together next to a column of icons that you can sort of see what they mean, but only after you already know what they do.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:21AM (4 children)
Disagree. Knowing the meaning of "but" and "ton," or "butt" and "on," does not allow you to know the meaning of "button." We do have to learn words individually. Words are just higher-order symbols composed of a specific set of sub-symbols. You can sometimes use knowledge of other words to infer the meaning of new and unfamiliar words, especially in the case of portmanteaus, but this is true of other symbols as well (and if you don't think thie following example is one symbol try copying it, and/or reconsidering your definition of symbols): 🌍☮️
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Sunday May 12 2019, @09:03PM
Disagree. I see your comment, I see the Reply button, I put my butt on it and eop0wfrop;wszkifrwesikfr0wszfrkwifrrfokrp0e;frxedcfvkvmkr
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday May 13 2019, @02:01AM (2 children)
African, Middle-Eastern and Southern European people are peaceful?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday May 13 2019, @05:59AM (1 child)
That's a view from space. The second one looks like a trident with a ring around it.
Obviously it means the aliens from space have heavy weapons and strong shields. Be afraid.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by Chocolate on Monday May 13 2019, @10:49AM
Agreed, from that high up it probably does look peaceful.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Sunday May 12 2019, @01:43AM (1 child)
There's an even bigger problem though which she completely glosses over, absolutely none of those emojis are vegan or vegetarian! It's horribly discriminatory that there are literally zero vegan emojis, they're all meat eaters. I think Google should immediately drop everything and prepare a complete and extensive set of both vegetarian and vegan emojis in order to address this blatant discrimination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @12:58PM
What about the halal ones? Surely someone must pay every time an emoji is used to ensure it is halal