PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicHabitats of the Mind: How Cultural Life Shapes the Built EnvironmentView all articles
The Communicative Umwelt for Creative Design, addressing the Psychology of Sustainability, to solve future global challenges
Provisionally accepted
- Department of General Psychology and Methodology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
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Design does not emerge solely from individual creativity but from ongoing interactions between humans and their Umwelt—the subjective, meaning-structured world through which environments are perceived, interpreted, and acted upon. This article develops the concept of a Communicative Umwelt as a psychologically grounded framework for sustainable design, specifying it as a system of entities, signals, channels, and feedback mechanisms that shape creative processes, user acceptance, and longer-term market dynamics. By operationalizing Umwelt beyond metaphor, the paper connects perceptual and cognitive psychology with design practice and sustainability-oriented innovation. The framework is situated in relation to adjacent literatures, including ecological psychology, design semiotics, participatory and systemic design, and sustainability transitions, and is distinguished by its focus on psychological meaning-making and feedback-driven transformation. Rather than advancing universal market claims, the article proposes mechanism-oriented pathways and boundary conditions under which locally embedded, context-sensitive design practices may foster sustainable consumption patterns. Sustainability is thus reframed not as a technical constraint but as an emergent outcome of communicative interactions between humans, artifacts, and socio-ecological systems, offering a theoretically informed basis for future empirical and comparative research.
Keywords: adaptation, creation, Design, Ecology, environment, Innovation leadership, Psychology, Radical innovation
Received: 24 Nov 2025; Accepted: 11 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Carbon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Claus-Christian Carbon
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