# The communicative Umwelt for creative design, addressing the psychology of sustainability, to solve future global challenges

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a psychological framework called the Communicative Umwelt to guide sustainable design by focusing on how humans interact with their environment.

## Contribution

It proposes a novel framework linking perceptual psychology with sustainable design practices through the concept of a Communicative Umwelt.

## Key findings

- The Communicative Umwelt is defined as a system involving entities, signals, and feedback shaping design and sustainability.
- Sustainability emerges from human-artifact-environment interactions rather than being a technical constraint.
- The framework offers mechanism-oriented pathways for context-sensitive design practices.

## Abstract

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.