Evaluation of Social Value Icons for a Domain-Specific Modeling Language

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the major challenges in modern society. Life Cycle Assessment with regard to sustainability is one of the current tools to asses and communicate a product’s impact on sustainability. But currently, life cycle assessments are difficult to communicate to the end-user due to their inherent complexity. Domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) can help to communicatecomplex information. Therefore, we have developed a DSML – TracyML – as a visual language to effectively communicate social sustainability of a product life cycle. Additionally, to help with effectively communicating the different aspects of social sustainability such as child labor and excessive working hours (among others), we have enriched the DSML with social value icons, representing these different aspects. In order to evaluate whether the icons are understood as we intended them to be, we conducted a survey. Thus, in this paper, we present an evaluation of the associativeness of TracyML’s social value icons based on the Multiple Index Approach using an online survey. The main outcome of the evaluation is that the icons (except for one) are all comprehensible and associated with the correct social values.