Curved walls; no-slip floors; no 90-degree corners; adjustable ramps not steeper than 25 degrees. These design guidelines sound like they could belong to any progressive architecture agency, but in fact they're rules intended for structures that house animals.

Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and she has a rather unusual area of design expertise: Livestock handling and facility design. Depending on your politics on meat, the subject of abattoir design may make you queasy, but these structures do exist and it behooves the animal farming industry to design them well.

Dr. Grandin designs facilities for both efficiency and the reduction of animal stress, and the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand are all populated with structures of her design; it's no wonder she was named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People of 2010." You can see CAD drawings of her designs here, and you can read one of her long, well-illustrated papers on such designs here.

(You may recognize Dr. Grandin's name from Temple Grandin, a recent and Emmy-Award-nominated HBO documentary detailing her professional development and challenges with autism.)