A Framework for Visualization Driven Eco Conscious Design Exploration

Abstract

A large portion of design activity involves applying previous design knowledge in order to solve new problems. Therefore, facilitating ecoconscious exploration of archived designs is needed for advancing sustainable product design. It is thus necessary to create integrated exploration tools that share common data representations for design and sustainabilityrelated product metadata. This can allow designers to observe covariations in design data and develop engineering intuition with regards to environmental sustainability performance. In this work, we present a framework for relating sustainability and product metadata using taxonomybased representations of lifecycle data. This facilitates simultaneous visualization of environmental indicators along with part similarities. To demonstrate this framework, we implement shapeSIFT, an interactive multidimensional visualization tool for ecoconscious design exploration. shapeSIFT uses a visual analyticsbased approach to represent part metadata and environmental indicators. This facilitates querybased dynamic exploration of part repositories.