Page - 196 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Modest contemplations in the public sphere of walking and eating AWONIYI, Stephen A. Texas State University, United States Abstract The street is one of the key spaces of public and private life. For its central role in making of modern life and contributing to the quality of social and personal life, it is a space worth probing in its multiple spheres of being and usage. We explore a nexus of human experience – where walking, eating, pleasure, social interaction, and more converge. In this particular case, we examine eating and walking and speculate on social facilitation: effect of social interaction on shift of state from noneater to eater while walking in the street. We take parameters from a survey and execute an agent-based model. In the survey, participants had scored ten theoretical factors as instigators of eating while walking in the street. In the current paper, we compare results with an earlier design which employed means of factors to define center of distribution for random-normal assignment of factor scores. In the current iteration, we use multiple regression to estimate a center, reasoning that factors tend to work in consonance with one another. Our model suggests chance of social facilitation. Any aspect of human behavior in the city that is known or understood facilitates programming the context in which the behavior happens. Those who design or manage urban settings either ground or supplement their versatility through encounter with a broad range of insights which inform urban space. Modelling provides one such consequential pathway to apprehension. Using the computer as a modelling tool facilitates managing the problem of anticipation of social action in space. Introduction “I'm a great one for eating while I'm walking.” (Anecdote 1) “You’ll see people...buy breakfast...already eating it on the way home.” (Anecdote 2) “Eating a sandwich...on my way to the office. I had to walk along a busy street and cross a few intersections....It’s an intimate journey.” (Anecdote 3) In experimental science, a time-tested pathway for fostering understanding of a phenomenon is through directed attention at its effects within a defined context – with the insight that variation of the value represented by the phenomenon-as-variable would precipitate a concomitant change in the environment of the problem. Exposition learns from experimental manipulation. Ensuing solutions to contingent problems can then be crafted to fit the as-described experimental problem unilaterally or are crafted in such a way that their ranges and tolerances are aimed at accommodating appropriate parameters of the problem, thereby accounting for real-life variances. So, imagine the case of pedestrians walking on a city street – more particularly, a sidewalk. The sidewalk must be able to move pedestrians along effectively as a primary function. The problem, however, is more complicated than that. The sidewalk must also accommodate people roaming while sightseeing, maundering on an idle stroll, stopping to talk, window-shopping, searching for 196