Why 2015 was the year of emoji

Let’s do an experiment. Grab your phone and open up your text messages. Scroll through a text thread until you land on an emoji. Chances are you didn’t have to scroll very far if at all, right?

For the past few years, emoji have been taking up prime space in our digital conversations. But they’ve actually been around since the 1990s, when a man named Shigetaka Kurita invented them while working at Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo. Emoji were a way to appeal to teens who were messaging and to distinguish Docomo from other competitors.