Which museum acquired NTT DoCoMo's original 1999 emoji set in October 2016?

The Museum of Modern Art acquired NTT DoCoMo’s original 1999 emoji set in October 2016. The acquisition brought Shigetaka Kurita’s pioneering mobile symbols into MoMA’s collection in New York.

The set contained 176 emoji, each designed on a tiny 12-by-12-pixel grid for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile service. Kurita drew on manga, emoticons, weather symbols, pictograms, and the constraints of early mobile screens. The icons included faces, hearts, weather, signs, and other compact visual cues that helped convey tone in short messages.

MoMA’s acquisition recognized emoji as an important part of communication and digital design, not merely as decorative phone graphics. The museum announced the addition on October 26, 2016, and later presented the work in the exhibition “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita.”

A common mix-up is confusing the original creator or carrier with the museum. Kurita designed the set while working for NTT DoCoMo; MoMA was the institution that acquired it. The Louvre, British Museum, and Tate Modern were not the museum named in this 2016 acquisition.