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Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication

Zhihan Zhang

Pu Thavikulwat

Yuxuan Mei

Shwetak Patel

Adriana Schulz

Vikram Iyer

Zach Englhardt

Tingyu Cheng

Gregory Abowd

Alex Metzger

Felix Hähnlein

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How can we bring sustainability information into everyday decision-making in real-time?

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How can we bring sustainability information into everyday decision-making in real-time?

Nutrition labels have made nutritional information accessible to the general public

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Demo: Chrome Extension

Github

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Demo: Shipping

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Demo: Paper Reading

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Life-Cycle Assessment

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How did we achieve this?

Environmental Impact Assessment
Communicating the Impact

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Life-Cycle Assessment

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How do we assess the environmental impact?

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Life-Cycle Assessment?

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a Methodology for assessing environmental impacts
associated with all stages of the life cycle

Example: iPhone 15 Environmental Report

Assess

Communicate

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LCA Process is Complex and Time-consuming

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Assess

Communicate

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Example of Inventory for a Phone

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Communicate

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Current LCA Data Collection

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Zachary Englhardt, Felix Hähnlein, Yuxuan Mei, Tong Lin, Connor Masahiro Sun, Zhihan Zhang, Adriana Schulz, Shwetak Patel, Vikram Iyer

Incorporating Sustainability in Electronics Design: Obstacles and Opportunities. CHI ’25 Honorable Mention

Information is NOT accessible

Currently there is NO regulation on sustainability-related disclosure

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Communicate

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Automate LCA via AI Agent

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Zhang and Metzger et al. Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication. IMWUT, 2025

Assess

Communicate

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Automate LCA via AI Agent

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Zhang and Metzger et al. Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication. IMWUT, 2025

Assess

Communicate

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Data Abstraction for Simplified LCA Methodology

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Zhang et al. Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication. IMWUT, 2025

Syntax

Benefits:

Expert Knowledge Distillation
Validation by Construction
Editability

Syntax of the data abstraction for our simplified LCA methodology. * represents the Kleene star operator, denoting variable-length sequences of items of the associated type.

The DA distills our in-depth research on how LCA is modeled and interpreted, and the key elements and structure necessary to create an accurate simplified LCA methodology. This also acts as a constraint for LLMs that bounds outputs within methodologically valid LCA representations.
Borrowing from principles in programming languages, our DA enforces validation similar to the idea of being "correct-by-construction": if an input cannot be expressed in the DA, the system cannot proceed with LCA.
The DA separates the model structure from the emission factor values, which allows users to dynamically substitute or personalize data sources (e.g., switching between ecoinvent versions, open sources, or proprietary databases) without reconstructing the model.

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Automate LCA via AI Agent

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Zhang and Metzger et al. Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication. IMWUT, 2025

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Communicate

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On Par with Human LCA

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Zhang and Metzger et al. Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication. IMWUT, 2025

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Communicate

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Compared to SOTA LLM

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Package shipping

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Compared to SOTA LLM

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Recyclable PVA PCB substrates

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Life-Cycle Assessment

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2. How do we communicate the impact?

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In-Context Interactive Communication

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Communicate

Environmental impact information in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent)

Also, lower is better!

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In-Context Interactive Communication

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Communicate

relatable equivalencies

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In-Context Interactive Communication

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Communicate

explanation + sources

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Example – Shopping

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Communicate

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Example - Cloud Computing

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Communicate

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Example - General Browsing

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Communicate

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Our Broader Research in AI for LCA

Environmental Impact Communication. Create in-context interactive learning environments through visualizations and explorable explanations.

Autonomous Sustainability Assessment. Create multi-agent self-play environment to automate LCA information retrieval.

Zhang and Metzger et al. Towards Autonomous Sustainability Assessment via Multimodal AI Agents. arXiv (under review)

Comparison Under Imperfect Information. Enable feedback early in design processes.

Zhang et al. DeltaLCA: Comparative Life-Cycle Assessment for Electronics Design. IMWUT, 2024

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Our Broader Research in AI for LCA

Environmental Impact Communication. Create in-context interactive learning environments through visualizations and explorable explanations.

Autonomous Sustainability Assessment. Create multi-agent self-play environment to automate LCA information retrieval.

Zhang and Metzger et al. Towards Autonomous Sustainability Assessment via Multimodal AI Agents. arXiv (under review)

Comparison Under Imperfect Information. Enable feedback early in design processes.

Zhang et al. DeltaLCA: Comparative Life-Cycle Assessment for Electronics Design. IMWUT, 2024

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First auto EI assessment tool that transforms unstructured natural language into in-context interactive visualizations.
Empower users with zero LCA expertise to explore the EI of their everyday objects and activities through an intuitive interface.
Introduce an LCA data abstraction for simplified LCA that enables bi-directional parameter visualization, and data source traceability.
Future: further enhance communication, improve trust, study behavior change promoted by more active personalized sustainability feedback

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Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication

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