Communicating life cycle assessment results to design decision makers: Need for an infomration visualization approach

Most of the design interventions made in the pursuit of reducing the environmental impact of products, often merely results in shifting the burden from one environmental issue to another, rather than reducing the overall environmental impact. This necessitates the use of more quantitative, comprehensive, life cycle based approaches for eco design decision making. In this paper, it is argued that the complexity of the results of LCA due to their data intensiveness calls for a need for using information visualization approaches to enable interpret LCA results for eco-design decision making.The paper then argues for a support for communicating the results of LCA to various decision-makers in order to improve their chances of building better environment-friendly products.The proposed nove information visualizationl architecture is intended to serve as a basis for a better representation of LCA results and provide deeper insights into the results of LCA, thereby aiding design decision-makers to improve the chances of reducing the environmental impacts of product life cycles being designed.