Living Sustainability: In-Context Interactive Environmental Impact Communication

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Zhihan Zhang, Puvarin Thavikulwat, Alexander Le Metzger, Yuxuan Mei, Felix Hähnlein, Zachary Englhardt, Gregory D. Abowd, Shwetak N. Patel, Adriana Schulz, Tingyu Cheng, Vikram Iyer

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 26 May 2026Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: 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.