For Ada Lovelace Day: Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is often referred to by the title of her 2006 book (and subsequent BBC Horizon documentary): “The Woman who Thinks like a Cow”. She is a Doctor of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University and she has ‘high functioning’ autism.
The first time I heard of her was on a Science Friday podcast from NPR, America’s National Public Radio four or five years ago and she was being interviewed (presumably about her book, but I don’t remember exactly) by the programme’s host Ira Flatow. She described how she experiences her autism, about how hypersensitive she is to sounds and bright lights and reflective surfaces, that she is often extremely anxious and jittery, and that she doesn’t think in language but in images. She went on to say that one day it dawned on her that animals might be experiencing the world in a similar way to her, which would go some way to explaining why they are often skittish and unpredictable, especially domesticated livestock when they are being processed for food, and this led her to become a world authority on animal behaviour and a designer of humane environments and livestock-handling equipment for the farming industry. I was fascinated by the explanations of her work and her descriptions of her childhood, but what stayed in my mind was the idea that someone could use a cognitive ‘defect’ to appraise a design from an entirely different perspective. That the idea of actually getting down to the eye level of a cow in a handling facility and seeing what it sees and paying attention to the smallest detail is trasferrable to all kinds of design and is where the greatest insights come from. That just as painting some chrome railings to prevent their gleam from balking cattle can make all the difference, so can just a slight tweak, a nudge, a different shape, colour or word mean the difference between success and failure of a website (I’m not trying to suggest that users of websites are like cows of course, but there is overlap… ;)
Fast forward to 2009 and the relevence hadn’t been lost on the design community as Grandin was invited to speak at Adaptive Path’s UX Week design conference, where she gave an hour long lecture on visual thinking to some of the world’s brightest digital designers.
(Temple Grandin PART 1 of 2 | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.)
(Temple Grandin PART 2 of 2 | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.)
And earlier this year, her status as a supreme, if reluctant, geek was sealed at the 2010 TED Conference where she gave another fine talk about visual thinking and the importance of encouraging different, alternative cognitive capabilities into the design and technology industries.
Often it is not easily feasible to get an external appraisal or insight, and designers have to consciously try to imagine themselves as other people, which is hard, or as if they were approaching the design for the very first time with no preconceptions, which is harder. I propose that, in honour of the woman who thinks like a cow, we should adopt the term ‘going Grandin’ when doing so…
