science

Shigetaka Kurita

Shigetaka Kurita is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Shigetaka Kurita rather than just read about it. In short: Shigetaka Kurita (栗田穣崇; born May 9, 1972, Gifu Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese interface designer often cited for his early work with emoji sets. Many refer to him as the creator of the emoji, a claim that has been corrected and clarified in recent years.

Key takeaways

Shigetaka Kurita belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Shigetaka Kurita to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Shigetaka Kurita from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Shigetaka Kurita (栗田穣崇; born May 9, 1972, Gifu Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese interface designer often cited for his early work with emoji sets. Many refer to him as the creator of the emoji, a claim that has been corrected and clarified in recent years. He was part of the team that created one of the first emojis used solely for communication, a heart-shaped pictogram that appeared on an NTT DoCoMo pager aimed at teenagers. It went on to become the Red Heart emoji. This development and the aftermath of its use led Kurita to design a set of 176 colored emojis. Many of the general-use emojis used today by Unicode can be traced back to Kurita's set. He now works for Dwango Co. Ltd., a Japanese game company owned by Kadokawa Dwango Corporation. The NTT DoCoMo emoji set he created is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

Creation of emoji sets While emojis existed prior to the 1990s, they were often defined as pictograms in Asia. The term emoji is of Japanese origin, with the term only adopted in the west from 2010 onwards. Japan itself also struggled to define the emoji for a number of years. It wasn't until telecom companies began experimenting with the use of graphic images or pictograms in messaging facilities that the emoji concept became a working idea. One of the first telecoms companies that trialed the concept of using pictograms in messaging facilities was NTT DoCoMo. In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a pager that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a pictogram as part of the text. The pager only had a single heart-shape pictogram as its option. This is thought to be Kurita's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in Asia which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart pictogram from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram. In interviews, Kurita said this experience left him and others at NTT DoCoMo knowing that symbols had to be part of future texting and communication services. For NTT DoCoMo's upcoming mobile system i-mode, it was decided that Kurita should design a set of pictograms, which could be used as characters on the new operating system.

NTT DoCoMo emoji set Kurita started designing an emoji set that could be used alongside the NTT DoCoMo heart emoji. He designed a set of 176 pictograms using a grid of 12x12 pixels that eventually started a global trend in the use of pictograms to communicate ideas through text messages. The set of pictograms became known as the first emoji set, as it is the first time the word had been recorded is thought to be used for pictograms. Emoji simply means "pictograph" or "icon" in Japanese. To make the emoji set, Kurita got inspiration from Japanese manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu (such as a water drop on a face representing nervousness or confusion), as well as from weather pictograms, Chinese characters and street signs. One of the most notable changes to other telecom companies that had started experimenting with emojis was the use and diversity of color in the set. Aside from basic numbers and shapes, the majority of the 176 emoji set contained color. The famous DTT DoCoMo heart remained as part of the set and was red. General-use emojis, such as sports, actions and weather, can easily be traced back to Kurita's emoji set. The yellow-faced emojis commonly used today evolved from other emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work. In 2016, the original set of 176 emojis was added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was exhibited in the exhibition Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita's designs are held in the collection of the M+ museum in Hong Kong, and were included in the 2018 exhibition Being Modern: MoMA in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. In 2025, Kurita's original DoCoMo emojis were included in the MoMA's Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, an exhibition featuring "widely recognized design icons [...] highlighting pivotal moments in design history."

References

External links

Shigetaka Kurita at the Museum of Modern Art

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Shigetaka Kurita

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Shigetaka Kurita claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Shigetaka Kurita before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Shigetaka Kurita ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Shigetaka Kurita

In research: Shigetaka Kurita appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Shigetaka Kurita in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Shigetaka Kurita is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1972 births, Creators of writing systems, Interface designers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Shigetaka Kurita outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Shigetaka Kurita in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Shigetaka Kurita means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Shigetaka Kurita out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Shigetaka Kurita in simple terms?

Why does Shigetaka Kurita matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Shigetaka Kurita?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Shigetaka Kurita.