“Schools don’t encourage learning to work with your hands at the moment“, one of the artists said, adding that manual labour in general is undervalued in today’s society.

Despite the book being directed at an American audience, artists agreed that it also applies to Dutch schools. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the book is a critique of our current education system. Although Temple Grandin is a prominent example of an autistic visual thinker, this new book is about visual thinking rather than autism, and the test we took is not about diagnosing autism, but about learning more about what kind of thinker you are. Visual thinking does not equal autismĪn important distinction we had to remind ourselves of throughout the evening is that not all visual thinkers are autistic, and not all autistic people are visual thinkers. The vegetable test is our equivalent to this experiment with church tower spires. Visual thinkers notice these kinds of things even when they are not trying to. Some people, when they pass by a church, will remember the church tower spires in detail, others will only vaguely remember that there was a church. “I did this test with a visual thinker on the phone a couple of days ago, and that person was able to correctly name the vegetable“, he said, and explained the meaning behind it: Temple Grandin talks about a similar idea when she mentions church tower spires. Willem also posed an additional question to the guests: When you walked into Mediamatic tonight, you must have passed by a vegetable. Willem had printed out copies of these questions for each guest, so that everyone could complete it during the roundtable. The test distinguishes two types of visual thinkers: object visualisers and spatial visualisers. “We should invite them both for a discussion together!“, artist and co-curator Annelies Wina Doom suggested, and others agreed: “What a good idea, let’s make it happen!“ What kind of thinker are you?Īfter this, we moved on to a more participatory exercise: on page 19 of 'Visual Thinking' you can find a test with 18 yes/no questions which can help readers to determine what kinds of thinkers they are themselves. This quickly lead us to think of another influential autistic person concerned with ecological issues: Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist. How does Temple Grandin think about meat consumption today?, we wondered. One thing that stood out to us was the depiction of Grandin’s relationship with animals, which prompted a discussion about how times have changed - while Grandin in her time was passionate about creating better conditions for animals in slaughterhouses, today, the general trend is clearly towards vegetarianism or even veganism. To start off the evening, we watched a part of the 2010 biopic about Temple Grandin, with Claire Danes in the leading role. Temple Grandin Temple Grandin & Greta Thunberg?

Visual thinking by temple grandin