Visualising Sustainability-Related Information: A Review of Visualisation for Sustainability in Manufacturing Industry

Industrial sustainability is attracting more and more attention in recent years. But sustainability data can be complex, hard to collect, and difficult to explain and use. We draw on visualisation research to improve the utility of sustainability-related information, which we categorise as normally being “invisible”. Better visualisation will facilitate practitioners to understand sustainability performance and eventually encourage better decisions to improve the sustainability performance of manufacturing industry. This research conducts a literature review through keywords searching. After filtering 319 results, we identified 28 papers as relevant ones and thematic analysis of the identified papers was conducted to understand their contents. The results of the literature review show that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM), Sankey diagram, etc., appear from the identified papers as visualisation tools or methods. We revealed two levels of visualisation on sustainability-related information, they are, assessment of sustainability and presentation of data, while the second level attracts less attention. Although some papers suggested that visualisation facilitates decision-making for improving sustainability performance, few studies paid attention to the effects of the visualisation. In the last, we also suggest dynamic visualisation as one of the potential developing directions for the visualisation of sustainability-related information, while the utility of creating such a dynamic system needs to be carefully analysed in advance.