Ultrasound scanning of the live foetus in the womb was pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s by Professor Ian Donald, Regius Chair of Midwifery at Glasgow University. This procedure offered an unprecedented view of the unborn child that affected the imagination and understanding not only of medical practitioners but also of ordinary people, including women who were, or could be, pregnant themselves. A working prototype and commercial production version of early ultrasound equipment was developed in 1962 by Dugald Cameron, a recent graduate of industrial design at Glasgow School of Art (GSA). Cameron was to become an influential design educator, becoming Head of Design at GSA in 1982 and then Director of the School in 1991.

This paper considers the range of drawing and imaging practices that were adapted and called into being in this design process, with reference both to new ergonomic concepts in industrial design and to traditional life room skills. Drawing on the recently acquired Dugald Cameron archive collection of drawings at GSA, this presentation examines the web of drawing practices and visual knowledges that students such as Cameron were acquiring and developing at this period. One question to be addressed is the role of the life room and its close study of human anatomy that continued as a mainstay of standard art school training until well into the mid-twentieth century, and the ways in which study of the human form migrated into ergonomic procedures of design drawing, and thence onwards into digital visualisation. Ultrasound equipment was an imaging technology that was used by human operators in order to peer into other human subjects. Although the imaging techniques, image quality and claims to knowledge of ultrasound imaging were significantly different from drawings produced in the life room, it would be mistaken to ignore some of the shared biopolitics involved in these projects of treating bodies as a technical and formal problem. Indeed, these similarities of unequal power, and unequal scrutiny were both about to come under strong attack in the period of second wave feminism, when the lived experiences, and campaign for informed self-help, of pregnant women were given voice.

While acknowledging the importance of these issues, however, the immediate focus of this paper will be on the drawing strategies and techniques of designers engaging with medical industrial design, body imaging, and the ultrasonic life room, using drawing archives, oral testimony, and reflective conversations on this developing field of practice informed by interviews with Dugald Cameron, and with some of his recent successors at GSA in the field of medical imaging.