Emerging Platial Narratives and Themes from a Leisure Walking Study

Abstract

This article presents the preliminary results of a think-aloud leisure walking study, identifying the key themes and platial narratives. A think-aloud study was conducted to explore what and how leisure walkers engaged with while walking. Our emerging results are presented in the context of an approach to extracting and understanding the platial experience during the study. The early findings suggest that the types of places engaged with while walking and the characteristics of these places are varied, while navigation and wayfinding have an impact on the selected route and the changes that occur during the walk. Our future work will now focus on further analysing these results and using them to improve the recommendation of leisure walking routes.