Visual Communication Methods and Tools for Sustainability Performance Assessment: Linking Academic and Industry Perspectives

Abstract

Effective decision-making based on quantitative analysis is limited by analysts’ abilities to visualize and interpret data and information, a critical challenge in sustainability performance assessment. Non-experts, including students and marketing/finance professionals, often lack experience in interpreting complex data and results, increasing the difficulty of evaluating product sustainability performance. A lack of robust and clear visualization frameworks represents a barrier in advancing the efficacy of sustainability analyses, the tools used for such analyses, and the decisions based on them, exacerbated by the gap between research and industry practice. Emerging and ongoing efforts are investigated by reviewing the research literature on the visual communication of quantitative sustainability performance information and by collecting direct input from sustainability assessment practitioners. While the communication of complicated and uncertain results is an active area of research, prior visualization tool development efforts in support of sustainable product, process, and supply chain design decision-making have found little commercial application. Viewed as a thorny challenge by practitioners, our analysis did not find universal guidance for visualization, but it did uncover best practices for presenting actionable sustainability analysis results that could provide a starting point. Based on the intersection of the literature analysis and primary source interviews, we provide a snapshot of the current state in the field and present potential research avenues.