Objective Healing and vitality are two common design concepts aimed at creating environments that benefit individual physical and mental health. Being not interchangeable, they may create different affective atmospheres and emotional experiences to meet different needs and preferences. This research aims to explore how to create streetscapes with healing and vital atmospheres in micro-renewal design by the method of evidence-based design.

Methods The 408 Research Group of Tongji University, in collaboration with the government of Miaohang Town, Baoshan District, Shanghai City, organized a participatory workshop to conduct street micro-renewal designs with the goal of enhancing affective atmospheres. The workshop undertakes the design of two segments of Gongkang Road in Miaohang Town, and sets the design concepts for each segment as “vitality” and “healing” based on the current issues of the segments and the teaching objectives of promoting research-oriented design. To achieve the intended design outcomes, the workshop first conducts thorough data collection, including site information gathering and resident interviews. The collected data is then analyzed to extract key information and identify design issues. Based on the research and analysis results, design proposals are proposed and developed. Finally, the conceptual design is presented in VR to prepare for the evaluation of the design outcomes. During the evaluation phase, stakeholders, mainly residents and community staff, are invited to experience the street environment before and after the design in VR. Using both self-reported emotional questionnaire and physiological indicators such as SCL (skin conductance level) of EDA (electrodermal activity), mHR (mean heart rate), RMSSD (the root mean square of successive differences between normal heartbeats) and HFnorm/LFnorm (ratio of LFnorm to HFnorm) of HRV as measures of emotion, laboratory experiments are conducted to test whether the healing and vitality street designs presented by VR have different effects on participants’ emotions, and to assess whether the designed environment has achieved the desired affective atmosphere.

Results The research results show that compared to the simulated replication of the real environment, both street atmospheres can significantly enhance residents’ positive emotions (joy and alertness), as well as surprise in other affective states. However, the improvement in negative emotions differs: The healing street design significantly reduces residents’ downheartedness, while the vitality street design significantly reduces irritability. At the physiological level, the vitality street design significantly increases SCL, while the healing street design significantly increases HFnorm/LFnorm. On one hand, the experimental results partly confirm the effectiveness of the design proposals for the two street segments. Specifically, the combination of “high-quality activity nodes and lively design elements” can create a vital street atmosphere, while that of “natural elements, street furniture with biophilic design, and recreation facilities” can contribute to a healing street atmosphere. In the early stages of street micro-renewal design, it is important to deeply understand the emotional attitudes of local residents toward the street environment as well as their needs and suggestions for renewal, and to set appropriate goals for creating emotional atmospheres, select design strategies and elements accordingly, and verify the design effects through scientific methods. On the other hand, it also suggests that VR environmental experiences can help designers verify early environment can creates the desired emotional atmosphere. The process of evidence-based design is defined as a cyclic structure, consisting of four steps: evidence collection, programming, design, and evaluation. With the assistance of VR technology, the evaluation phase in this research shifts from the post-implementation stage to the pre-implementation stage, overcoming the constraints of real-world construction, use, and post-occupancy evaluation in terms of construction costs and time. This means that multiple rounds of evidence-based cycles can be achieved in a virtual environment. The use of wearable physiological sensors provides more convincing data support for the design. The outcome evaluation model, which combines public participation workshops with empirical experiments based on VR devices and wearable physiological sensors, significantly reduces the cost of evidence-based design, enhances the scientificity and precision of design, and accelerates the accumulation of experience and knowledge.

Conclusion The research provides empirical evidence for the different effects of “healing” and “vital” street atmospheres on emotions and provides a new reference for evidence-based design processes. In the current era, where there is a need for a more detailed transformation of urban construction models and people’s emotions require soothing in the post-pandemic era, designers should pay more attention to creating emotional atmospheres in urban spaces. Therefore, design practices aimed at accurately creating specific emotional atmospheres, theoretical and empirical reseach that can provide supporting evidence for the aforesaid aim, as well as methods and pathways for achieving this aim, should be given more attention by designers and researchers and become one of the focal points of their work.