The video link to our ethics creative project is here.
In a world where Mirror is embedded into society, it is inevitable that the impact would trickle into TikTok. Our goal was to create a snippet of someone’s For You page on TikTok in this hypothetical future. We chose TikTok because short-form videos are great for expressing multiple ideas in a quick manner. The videos and commentary are meant to warn that by trying to fight against overconsumption, we might just be feeding right back into it with some of Mirror’s features. We created five videos where Mirror’s initial purpose, which is to promote mindful shopping, gets distorted and misused. In the first video, we explore someone using Mirror to Get Ready With Me. While relatively benign, we begin to see that Mirror isn’t being used for its intended purpose. In the second video, an influencer shows off how Mirror helps her organize her extensive closet, which prompts another user in the fourth video to criticize her for promoting overconsumption, since people need to buy more clothing to have a closet like hers. These three videos show the ethical implication of putting out a mindful shopping product with attractive features like a digital closet, where instead of being merely informative, the closet ends up influential in the wrong direction. By playing on people’s sense of envy, impulses, and materialism, Mirror definitely have negative societal impacts. This is why in our final design, we made sure to clearly emphasize the purpose of the app throughout and dissuade social elements like closet sharing. We also didn’t focus on closet metrics (such as how many jeans the user has), but instead on positive behavior metrics, such as how much money the user saved or how many items the user turned down buying.
We also explored alternative directions, such as the limitation of Mirror as just an app, not a person who can understand a user’s entire life context, and accidentally triggering shame in its users. We illustrated this through a TikTok where a user has gained weight recently and is reminded of it by Mirror through the low utility scores of their jeans. The last TikTok covers the dangers of Mirror needing monetization one day and selling data to ads to inform companies about a user’s clothing preferences, and how that can violate a user’s trust and autonomy. Overall, when launching an app like Mirror, we need to be very careful about its design to ensure that these negative, hypothetical situations do not play out.
