Page - 204 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

was a reversal at least once in each model. Among other things, these two questions suggest enquiries to pursue in further studies. Implications for design. The matter of eating while walking in the street is of interest to the designer and other managers of the urban context. A change of behavior holds potential of changing parameters of design and management. As mentioned earlier, an example of a critical parameter of design that might be affected by pedestrian behavior is walking speed. Multiple factors which affect free walking speed have been identified in past research. They include, body mass, sex, culture, purpose of trip (e.g. going to the fair, as opposed to making a court appointment), circumstances of trip (e.g. casual sightseeing, opposed to a timed scavenger hunt) and air temperature (Chattaraj, Seyfried and Chakroborty, 2009 ; Johansson & Kretz, 2012; Wagnild & Wall-Scheffler, 2013). In one example involving cultural difference, Chattaraj, Seyfried and Chakroborty (2009) compared free flow in a corridor space using an Indian and a German case. They found that density influenced speed once personal space (which they characterized as cultural) was taken into account. Speed was more dependent on density among participants in the German case than among participants in the Indian case. Wagnild and Wall-Scheffler (2013) looked at speed choices of persons alone, with friends of the same sex, with friends of the opposite sex and, particularly, with a friend who is a “significant other.” They found that, while men’s optimal speed is generally faster than women’s, when a man walks with a woman, he slows down in order to match the woman’s speed. Speed was slowest when the woman was a “romantic partner.” Wrote the authors: It has been suggested that dyad walking speed is correlated to relationship status....Thus, if male and female couples walk together, they may walk at significantly slower walking speeds than walking alone or with other acquaintances.” (paragraph 4) They added elsewhere that the degree of a man’s accommodation to fit the woman’s pace “is linked to the relationship status of the male-female pair, such that males will nearly match the females’ paces only if they are in a romantic relationship” (paragraph 15). A notable exception to the above is the case of a woman walking with a female friend, which recorded overall slowest speed: Previous work has noted that women report feeling extremely close to their female friends and here we show that women walk more slowly together even than they do with their Partner. (paragraph 15) How might walking speed, for instance, be influenced by eating? While we do not currently possess extant data, there are logical indications. Barkley and Lepp (2016) explored the impact of cellular phone usage on walking speed. They examined cellular phone use conditions/ behaviours of talking, texting, partial use (i.e. one of the behaviours only over a portion of length of the observation space) and no use. Results indicated that subjects in both the talking and texting conditions “took a significantly (p < 0.001) greater amount of time traversing the walkway 204