This book section is part of the material I prepared for the exhibition Ultrasonic Glasgow: 5-31 October 2019, organised by Professor Alastair Macdonald with contributions from myself and Susan Roan, Lecturer in the Department of Communication Design, GSA. It was intended to showcase the contribution of Dugald Cameron, the industrial designer and former student at GSA who also then became Head of the Department of Product Design at Glasgow School of Art, then later the School’s Director. In the 1960s as a new graduate, Cameron designed the first commercial versions of medical ultrasound scanning equipment that were developed in Glasgow in the early 1960s under a team of engineers and medical researchers under the leadership of Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at Glasgow from 1954-1976; these quite rapidly became standard equipment in obstetric practice in antenatal care worldwide.

I prepared an audio file consisting of excerpts from interviews with Cameron reflecting on his student experience in the life room and his later views as an educator for the exhibition, and I also researched and wrote this section ‘Life Class: from academic drawing to ergonomic body’ for the exhibition publication: Ultrasonic Glasgow. I used archival and historical research as well as interview material. Such first-hand testimony allows a more nuanced picture of the workings of complex design and research projects such as that of Ultrasound scanning to emerge. In particular, I aimed to convey how this particular case study fits within the history of drawing techniques as a tool of design and of self-fashioning by professional designers. I seek to investigate the interactions between training, self-motivated learning, visualisation and innovation in visualisation methods and techniques.