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Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication

delete2025-09-03
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PRE
AI
Z
Zhihan Zhang
P
Puvarin Thavikulwat
A
Alexander Le Metzger
Y
Yuxuan Mei
F
Felix Hähnlein
Z
Zachary Englhardt
G
Gregory D. Abowd
S
Shwetak Patel
A
Adriana Schulz
T
Tingyu Cheng
V
Vikram Iyer
DOI:10.1145/3749488delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Climate change demands urgent action, yet understanding the environmental impact (EI) of everyday objects and activities remains challenging for the general public. While Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) offers a comprehensive framework for EI analysis, its traditional implementation requires extensive domain expertise, structured input data, and significant time investment, creating barriers for non-experts seeking real-time sustainability insights. Here we present the first autonomous sustainability assessment tool that bridges this gap by transforming unstructured natural language descriptions into in-context, interactive EI visualizations. Our approach combines language modeling and AI agents, and achieves >97% accuracy in transforming natural language into a data abstraction designed for simplified LCA modeling. The system employs a non-parametric datastore to integrate proprietary LCA databases while maintaining data source attribution and allowing personalized source management. We demonstrate through case studies that our system achieves results within 11% of traditional full LCA, while accelerating from hours of expert time to real-time. We conducted a formative elicitation study (N=6) to inform the design objectives of such EI communication augmentation tools. We implemented and deployed the tool as a Chromium browser extension and further evaluated it through a user study (N=12). This work represents a significant step toward democratizing access to environmental impact information for the general public with zero LCA expertise.
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Journal

P
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
IF:
4.5
Papers:
1.1K
Citations:
7.2K

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