It’s just been announced that noted animal scientist and advocate for the autistic, Temple Grandin – a woman recently immortalized on film by Claire Danes, and honored as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people – will be coming to speak at U-M as part of the School of Art & Design’s Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Visitor Series. The event, which is scheduled to take place at the Michigan Theater, is free and open to the public on a first come first served basis. Following is the School of Art & Design writeup:
“Thinking in Pictures”
Temple Grandin is a Doctor of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University, bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry in animal behavior. Facilities she has designed are located in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. Curved chute and race systems she has designed for cattle are used worldwide and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people to reduce stress on their animals during handling.
As a person with high-functioning autism, Grandin is also widely noted for her work in autism advocacy and is the inventor of the hug machine designed to calm hypersensitive persons.
Images of the hug machine, for those who are interested, can be found here.
And here, for those unfamiliar with her work, is a scene from the documentary, “The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow.”
I’m too shy to stand up and ask during the event, but I’d be curious to know if she’s ever been consulted by those entities involved in the design and construction of prison complexes, or, for that matter, schools and airports. It seems as though there might be quite a bit of overlap.
