This research into industrial design, body imaging, and the ‘ultrasonic life room’ considers the range of drawing and imaging practices of body visualisation that were adapted and called into being by product designers in the immediate post-Second World War period in the UK with particular reference to the conceptual overlay of new ergonomic concepts in industrial design in relation to traditional life room skills. One question to be addressed is the role of the life room and its close study of human anatomy, and the ways in which study of the human form migrated
into ergonomic procedures of design drawing, and indeed how such visualisation migrated into later digital techniques. The article will touch on visualisation associated with the design development of ultrasound scanning equipment in Glasgow, but its main focus will be the professional formation of designers in this period, and the cultural politics of representing the human subjects of design. Ultrasound equipment was an imaging technology used by human operators in order to peer into other human subjects. While the paper will make reference to the
cultural biopolitics then and since of these techniques of body imaging, acknowledging the users and subjects of this visualisation, women, my central enquiry will be an investigation of the drawing strategies and techniques of designers engaging with medical industrial design, using drawing archives and oral testimony from practitioners in the field of medical imaging.
This research will contribute significant new work to the study of material cultures of drawing in relation to formation of practitioners in design and engineering, with reference to the unexamined culture and practices of art school training particularly in design disciplines, within fields of design history and technology studies. Similar studies on medical visualisation in specific local centres in the UK, such as Anderson, Neary and Pickstone (2007) on total hip
replacement, Nicolson and Fleming (2013) on obstetric ultrasound, or Casini (2011, etc. and forthcoming) on MRI scanning exist, but my research is original because of interdisciplinary methods combining histories of visualisation in science with an examination of visual enquiry and drawing for research conducted by design practitioners in the period under scrutiny. I consider residual legacies of aesthetics and drawing practices of art training against designing for human bodies. I investigate the ‘maker voice’ of designers, positioning myself between studies
of technological innovation and gender aware cultural research such as Waldby (2000- Visible Human Project), or Newman (1996- foetal imaging).
While this case study examines design and innovation in specific local conditions, it also indicates much broader changes that were representative of those throughout the UK and, indeed, much of Northern Europe such as the far greater interaction between technology and design in the period covered, particularly during the primacy of modernism as the default discourse of ‘establishment’ design and the close collaboration between government agencies, services, and nationalised industries and design practice in the UK that modernism engendered.