AIDING DESIGNERS TO MAKE PRACTITIONER-LIKE INTERPRETATIONS OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT RESULTS
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Gaetano Cascini, Marco CantaMESsa, Dorian Marjanovic, Monica Bordegoni
Author: Uchil, Praveen; Chakrabarti, Amaresh; Fantke, Peter
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Indian Institute of Science, India; 2: Technical University of Denmark
Section: User-Centred Design, Design of Socio-Technical Systems
Page(s): 179-188
ISBN: 978-1-904670-72-8
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provide tools to quantitatively illustrate the environmental impacts of a product throughout its life cycle. Effectively interpreting the results of a detailed LCA are fundamental for taking reliable decisions about evaluating design alternatives w.r.t environmental impact and for communicating the same across various actors. The goal of our research is to develop target specific interfaces to aid designers to make practitioner like interpretation of LCA results. In this paper we describe the challenges involved in practitioner like interpretation of LCA results and describe general requirement of a LCA interface to support effective (Practitioner like) interpretation. We develop a novel questionnaire based evaluation method to identify the issues in LCA tools, faced by designers in pursuit of practitioner like interpretations. In order to describe underlying cause of these issues, we use two constructs derived from domain of information visualization, namely explanatory and exploratory mode of interfaces.
Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment, User Centered Design, Ecodesign, Early Design Phases, Information Visualization