A User-Centered Perspective on Information Needs of Stakeholders in the Circular Economy

Circular economy is a promising approach to mitigate the negative social, economic, and ecological effects caused by ever-rising consumption. Making circular-friendly decisions that help maintain the value of products, materials, and resources in the product life cycle requires stakeholders to receive the right information at the right time. Discussions among representatives from research, industry, and politics are currently focusing on data management, software and hardware implementation, and standardization procedures to help data-based decision-making in the circular economy. Still, the pure availability of acquired data is not sufficient for actionable decision-making. How the data can be effectively interpreted by stakeholders in different product life cycle phases has received less attention. Visualization research has a long history of designing user-centered tools to solve application problems involving large data sets. In this paper, we reflect on open challenges regarding different stakeholder information needs in the circular economy and on the potential of user-centered design to address these challenges. We describe analysis tasks and information needs of circular economy stakeholders in different product life cycle phases. Next, we introduce the user-centered design methodology and describe its relevance for decisions in the circular economy, with a particular focus on information visualization. Finally, we exemplarily apply this methodology to develop a visualization of circular economy data that is tailored to the needs of consumers who decide what should happen to their product once it has reached its end of use. Based on this experience, we derive lessons learned for the design and use of information visualization in the context of circular economy.