Meat + Poultry - January 2006 - 72

Dr. Temple Grandin's From the Corral

Staying in touch with designs
A recent column I discussed common design mistakes in livestock handling facilities and how to avoid them
(See "Blueprints for handling success," M&P October issue, Page 52).
These design oversights are due to
lack of knowledge about animals, and
I have seen these types of mistakes for
the last 30 years.
However, during the past few years, I
have seen an increasing incidence of a
totally new type of mistake on drawings.
I think these blunders are due to errors
in how the brain perceives a drawing.
They are not the usual
dimension errors that
everybody, including
me, has made. These
new perceptual errors
have the potential to
mess up construction
projects throughout the
entire plant.
Back in the days of
hand drafting, I never
saw perceptual mistakes. When the paper drafters switched
to computers, there
were no perceptual
mistakes. Perceptual
mistakes started with
some of the younger
draftsmen who never learned to draw
by hand first.
I have students in my design class
who never learned how to draw a circle with a compass. Today, many children grow up without working with
tools and building things. This lack
of touch and physical activity may
be one cause of perceptual mistakes
on drawings. To fully understand the
things we see, they need to be related
to touch. This provides an understanding of three-dimensional objects. If
vision is restored to a person who
has been blind from birth, he will not

understand the meaning of the images
until he looks at an object and touches
it at the same time.
The following are some of the common perceptual errors I have seen on
drawings and how to avoid them.
Computer memory dump
A "computer memory dump on a
new site" mistake is most likely to occur when a plant is remodeled. Pen layouts or equipment designs from other
plants are transferred onto the plans
of a plant that is being remodeled.
The problem in these
drawings is in how the
transferable designs
will be connected to
existing parts in the
remodeled plant had
not been thought out.
On two drawings
with this mistake, the
alleys had sharp turns
of greater than 90
degrees. This would
have made handling
the animals extremely
difficult. Fortunately,
I found the mistakes,
and they were corrected before construction started. One
of the best ways to avoid these mistakes is to print out the drawings and
carefully go over them with an oldfashioned scale ruler.
The path that the cattle or pigs will
take should be traced out with a pencil. Doing this will force your brain
to see the mistakes. For drawings of
cutting rooms and other areas such as
coolers, the path of the meat should
be carefully followed with a scale
ruler and a pencil. Doing this will
synchronize touch with the image. In
several instances, I had to do this to
find some of the mistakes.

One of the best
ways to avoid
these mistakes
is to print out
the drawings
and carefully go
over them with
an old-fashioned
scale ruler.

MEAT&POULTRY

January 2006

www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Curves and circles
I recently received two drawings
where the center of the round crowd
pen was not in the center of the circle.
This is a mistake that some of the my
worst design students make. In the old
days, when compasses were used, I
never saw this.
Another common design mistake
results in gates that do not swing correctly or latch in the correct positions.
In some cases, the draftsman does not
know how to use the compass function
in the computer program. To avoid this
problem all gates need to be swung either with the compass function in the
computer or with a hand compass.
Also, you still need to check drawings with a scale ruler. I received a
beautiful drawing of a stockyard that
looked correct when I glanced at it.
However, when I used the scale ruler
to check some of gate dimensions, I
found some 25-foot-long gates. Gates
this long would be a disaster. To find
this error I had to slow my brain down
and get touch involved.
Dr. Temple Grandin operates Grandin
Livestock Systems, Inc., Fort Collins,
Colo., and is a faculty member in the
animal science department at Colorado
State Univ.
We would like to hear from you- your comments
and questions about this article are welcome.
E-mail the author at: meat&poultry@sosland.com

http://www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Meat + Poultry - January 2006

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