An Information Visualization Support for Practitioner-Like Interpretation OF Life Cycle Assessment Results

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely used to quantify the environmental impacts of products and systems, yet its effective application in design practice remains limited due to challenges in interpreting complex, multi-dimensional results produced by professional LCA software. Existing tools are primarily developed for expert practitioners and offer limited support for practitioner-like interpretation by novice users such as designers and engineers.

This thesis investigates the role of usability and information visualization in supporting interpretation of LCA results. A task-centred evaluation framework is proposed to benchmark the usability of professional LCA interfaces for interpretation tasks grounded in standard LCA practice. Controlled usability studies with novice users, supported by practitioner reference traces, are conducted to establish baseline performance and to identify systematic interaction and interpretation breakdowns.

Based on the identified gaps, a set of visualization and interaction design guidelines is developed and applied to create an interactive visualization system for LCA results. The proposed system is evaluated using the same task-centred framework, enabling evidence-based assessment of the effects of visualization-driven interface redesign. Results demonstrate measurable improvements in task effectiveness and interaction efficiency for several interpretation tasks, while explicitly avoiding tool-to-tool performance comparison claims.

The contributions of this work include a reproducible evaluation framework for LCA interface usability, empirical benchmarks for practitioner-like interpretation tasks, and validated visualization design principles for complex environmental assessment data. The findings aim to inform the design and evaluation of future LCA tools and other data-intensive engineering analysis systems.