Investigating Product Designer LCA Preferred Logics and Visualisations

Overview & Synopsis

Product designers are frequently subject to analyse the environmental lifecycle performance of the product they design through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results available to them. The LCA delivers multi-criteria and multi-environmental impact indicators results for improving the design of the product under development at any stage of the design process in any industrial context. Gaining time and precision in this LCA results analysis is crucial for product designers. In this view this research focuses on supporting an efficient matching between a product designer profile and some pre-formalised lifecycle visualisations, called heuristics. To do so this paper investigates product designer's logics in analysing LCA results, as well as their preferred visualisations in the interpretation process. The experimental protocol developed to capture these product-design oriented LCA analysis preferences (logic and visualisation) is presented. Capturing their needs regarding LCA results was the first part of this research, detailed in this paper. The second part is focused on building the visualisations satisfying theses needs. The resulting process of LCA analysis will be then assessed in term of efficiency. The short-term research perspective is to formalise those trajectories heuristics through an interoperable application adapted to the various types of software used in industry based on the LCA methodology. Additional profiles addressed by governmental or enterprise decision makers can be added in the coming years using the same methodology.