Incorporating Sustainability in Electronics Design: Obstacles and Opportunities
🤖 AI Summary
Lifecycle assessment (LCA) remains underutilized in ICT hardware design due to persistent organizational and procedural barriers—including fragmented data access, dispersed accountability, ambiguous cost allocation, and others—hindering sustainable design integration.
Method: Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 industry experts and thematic coding analysis, this study systematically identifies and theorizes five core implementation bottlenecks.
Contribution/Results: It presents the first theoretical map of sustainable design adoption barriers in ICT hardware development. The paper introduces the novel paradigm of “HCI-enabled real-time LCA integration,” proposing a human-computer interaction framework that supports dynamic LCA computation and co-located design decision-making. Four actionable intervention opportunities are distilled to operationalize sustainability assessment within electronic product development workflows. The findings deliver an interdisciplinary, practice-oriented guideline for embedding LCA into industrial design processes.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for holistically measuring the environmental impact of a product from initial manufacturing to end-of-life disposal. However, the extent to which LCA informs the design of computing devices remains unclear. To understand how this information is collected and applied, we interviewed 17 industry professionals with experience in LCA or electronics design, systematically coded the interviews, and investigated common themes. These themes highlight the challenge of LCA data collection and reveal distributed decision-making processes where responsibility for sustainable design choices, and their associated costs, is often ambiguous. Our analysis identifies opportunities for HCI technologies to support LCA computation and its integration into the design process to facilitate sustainability-oriented decision-making. While this work provides a nuanced discussion about sustainable design in the information and communication technologies (ICT) hardware industry, we hope our insights will also be valuable to other sectors.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Challenges in integrating LCA into electronics design processes.
Ambiguity in responsibility for sustainable design choices and costs.
Opportunities for HCI technologies to support LCA computation and integration.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) for environmental impact measurement
Interviews and systematic coding to analyze LCA data collection
HCI technologies to integrate LCA into sustainable design processes
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