A Framework for Visualization-driven Eco-conscious Design Exploration

A large portion of design activity involves reuse of previous knowledge in order to solve new problems. Therefore, facilitating eco-conscious 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 co-variations 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 taxonomy-based representations of lifecycle data. This facilitates simultaneous visualization of environmental indicators along with part similarities. To demonstrate this framework, we implement shapeSIFT, an interactive multi-dimensional visualization tool for eco-conscious design exploration. ShapeSIFT uses a visual analytics-based approach to represent part metadata and environmental indicators. This facilitates query-based dynamic exploration of part repositories.