Digital Intelligent Design Methodology of Wellness Tourism Spaces Based on Regional Cultural Characteristics
Regional culture is increasingly treated as a design resource in wellness tourism, where destinations embed local symbols in intelligent environments to differentiate their offerings; yet the mechanism by which such symbols become embodied cognitive events and translate into user experience value remains underspecified. This study integrates embodied cognition, cultural semiotics, and environmental psychology to construct a four-stage activation model—symbol stimulus, somatic perception, cognitive processing, and experience generation—and develops a moderated mediation framework in which intelligent environment design conditions the symbol-to-experience pathway across presentation, perception augmentation, and feedback regulation layers. A mixed-methods design was implemented at four regionally distinct wellness tourism sites (Wuyi tea retreat, Naxi botanical center, Jiangnan AR-augmented garden resort, and Shandong Confucian pavilion), combining 407 valid questionnaires, biometric monitoring of 128 participants, and 36 in-depth interviews. Structural equation modeling indicates that embodied multisensory activation is associated with roughly 70% of the stimulus-to-cognitive-depth pathway as an estimated indirect effect, with ritual-behavioral and botanical-olfactory symbols showing steeper transmission than material-artifactual ones. Moderated mediation analysis suggests that a higher level of intelligent environment application is associated with stronger, rather than weaker, embodied uptake within the observed coupling range, although this association operates asymmetrically across the three design layers. Because the questionnaire data are cross-sectional and visitors encountered site-specific symbols under naturalistic rather than randomized exposure—with the biometric subsample drawn from consenting volunteers and the mediator and moderator measured, respectively, through validated self-report scales and independent site-level expert ratings—the findings are read as associations consistent with the proposed mechanism rather than as causal proof. The findings advance mechanism-level understanding of how regional culture drives intelligent environment design in wellness tourism spaces and offer design heuristics for segmenting symbol programming, prioritizing perception-augmentation investment, and calibrating technological coupling against the saturation boundary of user experience.