Introduction
Environments providing mental health services are regarded within clinical literature as having an effect on a patient’s sense of well-being.1 Patients’ experience of such spaces can have a highly emotional dimension,2 which is suggestive that environment design should be investigated as a potential means to influence therapeutic efficacy. Further, individuals have differing abilities to censor or suppress their environments,3 and a stressed patient has reduced capacity to exclude environmental distractions,4 suggesting mental health service environments may have more impact for these individuals who often arrive in a distressed state.
Within healthcare environments, the emerging field of evidence-based design (EBD) explores the links between wellbeing and good design practice of the built environment. By optimizing both design processes and design outcomes, knowledge produced within this field seeks to improve staff performance, augment patient healing and enhance service outcomes and experiences. With recent developments in technology and advanced modelling systems, novel forms of architecture and representation are now possible, freed from the limitations of the orthogonal drawing system of plan, section and elevation, and two-dimensional representations such as photographs.5 The design of architecture is now being created through digital, three-dimensional drawing techniques and virtual reality (VR) experiences, which open up the possibilities for the inhabitation of architectural representations and propose new kinds of architectural spaces. Research focused on direct comparisons between real and virtual environments has investigated how cognitive and affective environmental appraisal and human patterns of movement correspond in both environments.6 7 VR can also support preoccupancy building evaluations by the proposed end users. However, only a handful of existing studies have investigated this potential.8 Experiential qualities of space can impact decision making, activities and spatial inhabitation. For example, studies have found that darker virtual environments feel more unpleasant,9 and participants tend to avoid darker corridors when presented with a choice of light-filled corridors.10 Therefore, ‘it is important to not only look at behavioral outcomes, but to understand how people experience virtual spaces’.11