A built environment is psychosocially supportive, when its quality can strengthen or sustain the ability of an individual to perform his/her role, conduct him-/herself in society, and communicate or interact with others in accordance to his/her values, interest, and self-concept. The aim of this thesis was to investigate potential methods in design and re-design for identification, visualization, and evaluation of such environmental qualities. The thesis is divided into two main theoretical approaches of psychosocial supportiveness. The first approach, the psychoevolutionary, postulates that stress-related anticipation, negative evaluation, and harm as well as emotion and aesthetics affect the individual. Finding a methodology which reveals all these factors in terms of environmental qualities was one of the objectives of the first part of the thesis. An Empowering Environment Evaluation (Triple-E) tool was developed and tested in a hospital, a health care facility, and a railway operational environment. Initially, the Triple-E was a combination of a structured brainstorming session, a semantic environmental description, and an architectural aesthetical preference measure. The results of these building performance measures indicated, that participants' opinions about the negative environmental aspects with respect to psychosocial supportiveness were somewhat difficult to grasp. Nevertheless, the Triple-E tool provided sufficient information about the psychosocial qualities of the indoor environments to generate design scenarios. These scenarios were constructed using a research-based design model. The evaluation of the design scenarios showed that, overall, the indoor components like artificial light and windows appeared to be the most psychosocially supportive entities. The second approach, the attention restoration theory, postulates that an environment is psychosocially supportive when restoration of depleted mental resources can be achieved through four constructs (being away, extent, fascination, and compatibility). To detect restoration supportive environmental qualities, the architectural aesthetical preferences questionnaire was modified to be sensitive on restoration (the Built Environment Restoration Support (BERS)). Two studies were conducted, one in Sweden and one in the Netherlands. The aim of these was to identify, visualize, and evaluate restorative supportiveness. While the Swedish study was a CAD-based visualization, the Dutch study was a real environment. The framework for designing both scenarios originates from the perceptual model of Brunswik (1956). The combination of the most frequent distal and proximal cues provided the criteria for the restorative design scenarios. As a conclusion, environmental components such as carpets (Persian carpet, dark and thick, single color), windows (many and large), and doors (covered and closed) as well as view (a nice open garden with a lawn and a pond) and natural light (a lot of daylight and candle) might be some architectural details which facilitates restoration and, thus, psychosocial supportiveness in the indoor environment. The two theoretical approaches resulted in design scenarios and in both similar environmental components were identified in relation to psychosocial supportiveness. These common environmental features indicated freedom/control through the natural and artificial light and openings as well as safety/security through walls, floor, and ceiling. This duality of experience of psychosocial supportiveness in the indoor environment is possible to trace back to the very basic human instincts of survival in terms of escaping and shelter. Further exploration of psychosocial supportiveness in design is needed. As a scenario, the combination of the two theories into a process continuum with enhanced relations to indoor environmental details might be a clear application model for design professionals.

In this thesis, psychosocially supportive environmental components are identified and environmental assessment techniques are investigated to evaluate psychosocial components in built environments, particularly in health care environments. The aim is to develop a method useful for designers in collecting quantitative as well as qualitative information about the psychosocial supportiveness of the built environments. In the first paper, an evaluation of the multi-methodological tool (Empowering Environment Evaluation (Triple-E)) was conducted in a hospital ward and a health care center. The aim of the paper was to appropriately select, and test the multi-methodological tool in two cases, where redesign of the existing facilities took place. The results show that, with the Triple-E tool, psychosocially supportive components of the environment could be measured by the combination of structured brainstorming, semantic environmental description, and aesthetical preferences. User group differences were found and further considered for the design process. The analysis-synthesis model of design facilitated the designers understanding of how psychosocial approach could be integrated in the design cycle. In the second paper, the Environment Evaluation tool consisting of a modified semantic environmental description questionnaire and an evaluation of architectural details. The aim of the study was to identify whether there are any differences in perception of psychosocially supportive architectural and interior elements among patients and architects. The results show that there are differences between patients and architects in terms of factors contributing to psychosocial supportiveness. Results also show that the significant architectural details may influence individual psychological skills, which in turn may affect individual social skills and self-management. The ranking of the influential architectural details on perceived supportiveness for the architect and the patient groups is in the following order: 1) window; 2) floor and wall; 3) ceiling and furniture; 4) handicraft, photograph, chair and curtain; 5) noise level, safety, and space for moving. By relating environmental details to environmental semantic descriptive factors further details of psychological and physical factors could be realized. Suggested improvements of the Triple-E tool are the inclusion of measurements of restorative environmental components which may further contribute to stress alleviation and of more structured guidelines for the design purposes.

Introduction Focusing the investigation on health supporting built environmental components, researches showed (Shepley & McCormick 2003), that therapeutic environments are powerful agents of healing (Canter & Canter, 1979) for patients. Ulrich's theory (1991) depicted that, therapeutic environments unproved medical outcomes of patients by reducing stress. Research findings show that therapeutic environments for patients allow recovery from stress through access to nature, exercise and physical movement, and enhanced social activities (Calkins, 1988; Cohen & Weisman, 1991; Devlin, 1995; Kaplan, et al., 1999; Shepley, et al., 1995; Parsons, et al., 1998; Ulrich, 1984, 1991). Outcome-based research findings are beginning to reveal that beyond recovery from stress, therapeutic environments are related positively to improved health and behavioral outcomes of patients (Lawton, et al., 1996; Rubin, et al., 1997; Zeisel, 2001b; Zeisel, et al., 2001). Problem identificationThere is a clear need for research to identify environmental characteristics that tend to be stressor and what end-use consumers really need and want in health care environments (Davidson & Teicher, 1997; Devlin, 1995; Gray et al. 2003; Potthoff, 1995; Shepley et al., 1995; Stern et al., 2003; Ulrich, 1991; Ulrich et al., 2003). A comprehensive qualitative measurement technique would be preferable in contradiction to focus group discussions, which can, at least, establish a shared view on the environment and even more, enable/empower the participants /consumers to act toward the proposed plan together with the design professionals.Aim and research questionThe aim of the research is to develop a method which gathers both quantitative and qualitative measures on the well-being supportiveness of the environmental attributes and also useful tool for design or re-design purposes.What are the psychosocially supportive components of the built environment, and is the suggested multi-methodological approach an appropriate tool for evaluating those components?The objectives specific to research questions are the following:1. To investigate the relevance of psychosocial components in the suggested multi-methodological tool2. To analyze the data gathered by the suggested tool in terms of well-being supportiveness in a real environment setting3. To provide guidelines for designers about psychosocial supportive environmental components integrated in the design process4. To evaluate the proposed design by comparing it to the existing environment 5. To compare design professionals and laypersons perspective with regards to perceived psychosocial supportiveness Study design / methodologyThe study will be conducted among health care personnel, patients and visitors (the end users of design). A multi-methodological approach, the Triple-E (Fischl & Gärling, 2003) will he used at different health care environments. Triple-E tool consists of three stages, namely the Empowerment session, Environment assessment session and the Evaluation of architectural details session.Empowerment session. The empowering session is based on the Future Workshop (FW) method (Jungk & Müllert, 1987), which is a participatory based brainstorming technique. It is adapted to draw out opinions, feelings, and emotions of users toward a built environment regarding psychosocial supportivenessEnvironment description. Küller's model (1991) describes the mechanism of human emotion processes from a human-environmental interaction point of view. The semantic environment description was built on this model and has been administered in this study.Evaluation of architectural details. The evaluation of architectural details consists of a questionnaire focusing on perceived well-being and preferences, specific to the quality of the environmental elements. The questionnaire was designed based on individual interviews of health care personnel and patients, and was pilot tested within the same subject groups. The questionnaire measures temporal mood, feeling of safety and perception of noise level as part of the evaluation. Preliminary ResultsThe preliminary results show that, with the Triple-E tool, psychosocial components of the environment can be measured by a combination of a structured brainstorming session, a semantic environmental description session, and an architectural details session. The structured brainstorming session yielded data mainly on the physical environmental complaints and functions (79%); the semantic description was more associated with the aesthetic quality of the environment (83%); while the architectural details contributed almost equally to both. User group differences were found and further considered in the design process. The analysis-synthesis model of design helped to make the designer understand how psychosocial approach could be integrated in the design cycle. The ranking of the influential architectural details on perceived supportiveness for architect and patient groups is in the following order: 1) window; 2) floor and wall; 3) ceiling and furniture; 4) handicraft, photograph, chair and curtain; 5) noise level, safety, and space for moving. Preliminary results show that the significant architectural details may influence individual psychological skills, which in turn can affect the individual social skills and self-management.