Impact Landscapes by Jheronimus Academy of Data Science

In recent years, the relevance of sustainable decision-making has continuously increased in solving society’s environmental challenges. Such decision-making should take a facts-based life cycle perspective to prevent burden-shifting and effectively tackle these challenges. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardized four-phase framework that aims to facilitate this by quantifying sustainability through a wide range of environmental impact indicators. While LCA has seen increased adoption since the 1990s, the visualization of its results often does not capture the complex underlying hierarchical structure and has predominantly been geared towards LCA experts. Consequently, LCA results are often hard to understand for, and communicate to, non-LCA experts like policy and decision-makers. In response to this, I created an open-source interactive visualization system based on Voronoi treemaps that supports the interpretability and communication of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA). The system was designed to resemble aerial views of agricultural fields and was subsequently names "Impact Landscapes".

The project was carried out as part of my master thesis at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science in collaboration with Deloitte Consulting NL. The project followed the four phase visualization design framework of Tamara Munzner. Furthermore, throughout the project, LCA experts and other stakeholders were involved in the design process on multiple occasions.