The inventor of emoji on his famous creations – and his all-time favorite

MoMA in New York has just added the first emoji to their collection - Shigetaka Kurita explains how he designed them, and how it all started with the heart

I was part of a team that spent about two years designing the first emoji for the launch of i-mode [NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet system] in 1999. It limited users to up to 250 characters in an email, so we thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate. Plus using only words in such a short message could lead to misunderstandings " It's difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters.

In the mid-1990s, before mobile phones, we used to have pagers in Japan called Pocket Bells. They were cheap and really popular among young people, partly because they had a heart symbol. Then a new version of the Pocket Bell came out that was intended more for business use, and the heart symbol was dropped. It caused an outcry, to the extent that young users left DoCoMo and signed up with another Pocket Bell company that had retained the symbol. That's when I knew that symbols absolutely had to be part of any texting service. That was my main inspiration.