Curious Minds Podcast: Why We ♥️ Symbols

From logos to love notes, to capturing the essence of entire cities in a single image, our impulse to use symbols is what makes us, well, us.

But what makes us look at a drawing of a bitten piece of fruit and instantly think of iPhones and computers? And can we really assume that other people will understand us when we send a certain emoji?

In our second episode of Curious Minds, we explore where symbols, like the heart, come from and how they keep changing.

Including excerpts from a 2019 Domestika Maestros interview with designer Milton Glaser on the story behind his iconic I ♥️ NY logo, we speak with Marcel Danesi, a professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and Art Historian and author Valerie Shrimplin to discover how artists, media, and brands have transformed the meaning of symbols throughout history.

You can download the transcript of this episode at the end of this article.

“They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and the use of a symbol like a heart can sum up and convey an idea very succinctly - which is part of the artistic aims of many artists,” says Dr. Shrimplin.

While the shorthand that abstracted symbols create helps images communicate with us quickly, our collective understanding of what they mean relies on context and our own visual literacy. We look at and understand a flirtatious emoji, or a skull and crossbones, because we’ve learned what they represent.

What a symbol represents is flexible and can change over time though. The shape we today associate with the heart - two round bumps with a pointed bottom - can be found on ancient artifacts, and while there are theories as to what it signified, “who the heck knows what a heart symbol might have meant in Egypt, unless someone wrote about it,” says Dr. Danesi.