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A. Millonig, K. Schechtner:
"Understanding Walking Behaviour - Pedestrian Motion Patterns and Preferences in Shopping Environments";
Talk: Walk21 - 9th International Conference on Walking, Barcelona, Spanien; 2008-10-08 - 2008-10-10; in: "Walk21 - 9th International Conference on Walking", (2008), Paper ID 51, 12 pages.

The promotion of walkable environments and the design of attractive places for walkers require comprehensive knowledge about pedestrians´ needs and preferences. However, so far little is known about the factors encouraging people to walk in specific environments and prompting them to avoid others. As previous studies have already indicated, the design and structure of the surrounding indoor or outdoor environment is counted among the most crucial determining factors.
Especially in the field of marketing research a lot of effort is put on the identification of relevant parameters affecting the spatial behaviour of shoppers. Some of these results had a large impact on shopping centre architecture, e.g. the predicted evolvement of shopping to an active leisure activity led to the creation of large landmark shopping centres which offer specific thematic, interactive surroundings (e.g. Canal City, Fukuoka, Japan). Turley and Millimen (2000) researched the atmospheric effects on shopping behaviour and especially lighting concepts proved to be of high relevance for movement behaviour in shopping streets.
A currently ongoing study is focussing at the investigation of pedestrian spatio-temporal behaviour in indoor and outdoor shopping environments. A combination of different qualitative-interpretative and quantitative-statistical empirical methods is employed in order to obtain a comprehensive insight to human motion behaviour and underlying intentions, motivations and individual preferences. Special attention is paid on the investigation of potential differences of indoor and outdoor behaviour patterns and related influence factors. We present initial results based on a data set collected from 130 interviews of pedestrians in indoor and outdoor shopping environments, who were asked to give a self-assessment of their walking behaviour, preferred environmental attributes, and other walking-related characteristics. The experimental results include identified key attributes, classes of homogeneous self-perceptions, and a comparison of indoor and outdoor results.

http://www.walk21.com/conferences/barcelona.asp