Shigetaka kurita biography of michael
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The story of the first emoji begins in Japan in the late 1990s, a time when mobile phones were becoming increasingly popular but were still limited in how they allowed people to communicate. Texting was constrained to plain words, which often left messages open to misinterpretation. Shigetaka Kurita, a designer working for the telecommunications company NTT DoCoMo, envisioned a way to make digital communication more expressive.
At the time, Kurita was part of a team developing "i-mode," one of the first mobile internet services. As they worked on making text messaging more user-friendly, Kurita realized there was no simple way to convey emotions, tone, or context. Inspired by manga (Japanese comics) and kanji characters, Kurita decided to create tiny pictograms that could enhance messages and add layers of meaning.
In 1999, Kurita designed the first set of emojis—a collection of 176 symbols, each just 12x12 pixels in storlek. These tiny icons included simple representa
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Romanesco I + II, 2017
According to the Wedgwood Museum[1] “Rococo-inspired wares formed a very small part of early Wedgwood production, but the most distinctive of these were those naturalistically-moulded earthenware fruit and vegetable forms made around 1760. Other potters in Staffordshire also made similar wares at this time. The lower portions of the cauliflower wares received a decoration of a brilliant green glaze, considered by many to have been developed by Wedgwood himself around the time of his partnership with Thomas Whieldon, master potter at Fenton.”
I have been attracted to these early Wedgwood pots, and chose to use them as the starting point for a vase that connects art and mathematics. The florets of the cauliflower are arranged in a spiral formation which can be seen here in this beautiful Romanesco cauliflower.
Like sunflowers and pine cones, the pattern created by the florets conforms to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Spiral, a simple mathematica
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A Brief History of Emojis
In the late 90's, Shigetaka Kurita invented the emoji in response to an early mobile website that had been launched. The site was similar to ones that we are used to today. It combined things like weather, news, and entertainment on a single platform. A critical difference, however, is that instead of using symbols to explain things like the weather (sun for sunny or cloud for cloudy), it would say things like "fine" or "bad." This was terribly confusing for Kurita as "fine" could mean a whole range of experiences.
In the beginning, there was the word and the word was code and the code was turned emoji.
The first generation of emojis was not standardized. Because emojis are based on a numeric code this caused some complications. For example, a smiley face may be coded as number 123,456 for one cell phone carrier, but 123,456 might be an ice-cream cone or just not exist on another carrier.
Though this continued to b