The CAT LAB is the University of Westminster's Marylebone home for creative and advanced technology. We take powerful tools usually reserved for specialists and put them directly in your hands.
We are a third kind of space: between the classroom and the workshop, the physical and the digital.
→02We make technology safe, simple, and accessible.
→03The Lab is open to you throughout the semester for supervised drop-in making, wherever you have earned the credentials to work.
→04There are many ways in: visit as a Guest, join as a Member, train as a Maker, grow with the Team, or partner with us in research.
→We are a third kind of space: between the classroom and the workshop, the physical and the digital. We put powerful tools directly in your hands and teach you how to use them. Designed around you, run by the same team since 2013, the Lab is a shared community where academic ambition meets technological capability.
The CAT LAB is the University of Westminster's Marylebone home for creative and advanced technology.
Our mission is to democratise technology. We take powerful tools usually reserved for specialists and put them directly in your hands, whatever your discipline or previous experience. We do not operate the machines for you. We teach you to use them for yourself.
We are user-centred, academic-led, and community-focused. Everything here is designed around the people who use it, built in service of academic work, and run as a community rather than a counter. We close the gap between academic ambition and technological capability for every student, colleague, and collaborator.
We integrate physical making and digital technologies in a single, coherent environment. From the Workshops to immersive spaces, and from specialist printing to robotic fabrication, we combine the full spectrum of creative and advanced technologies in one place, managed in the same way, and run by the same academic team that has been designing, building, and refining the Lab since 2013.
Our specialist territory is the frontier between the physical and the digital: a rapidly advancing world where the real and the virtual meet, merge, and expand one another. Not technology for its own sake, but tools that extend what we can all do, organised by the human capabilities they amplify: Compute · Capture · Immerse · Sense · Craft · Automate.
The Lab is a third kind of space. Between the classroom and the workshop, academia and industry, theory and practice.
We make technology safe, simple, and accessible. We publish our risk assessments openly and print hazard bands on every machine, so it is always clear what you are ready for. We teach you in bite-sized pieces, you earn micro-credentials that stay with you, and our App learns about you as you go, always pointing to your next step.
We make technology safe. We risk-assess every space, technology, and material, not to restrict access, but to minimise hazards and make more available to more people. We publish assessments transparently and in full, with Golden Rules summaries, on the CAT LAB App. In the Lab, we print one of six coloured hazard bands, from white to red, so it is clear at a glance what you can do and where you have more to learn.
We make it simple. We demystify complex technology so anyone can use it. You'll find every machine painted grey, so the markings you need to see stand out, and every tool on a labelled shadow board, so you can find and replace things without asking, while learning what things are called. Our physical and virtual environments are always designed to guide you, so you can feel at home and work confidently and independently straightaway.
We make it accessible. We provide the instruction you need to get started, and the progressive learning required to build capabilities over time. We teach exactly what's needed to address hazards safely, alongside the essential skills you need to make things, blending safe practice with best practice. To keep growing, our one-hour Upskills take techniques deeper, one at a time. Every course you complete earns a micro-credential: a qualification that stays with you and makes new technologies yours to use.
We make it efficient. We value your time as well as ours. We keep everything as quick and straightforward as we can, without skipping what matters. We break technology training into bite-sized pieces, online, optional, and in your own time when it can be; mandatory, in person, and supervised where it has to be. Always offered when you need it, to be taken at your own pace, and designed to fit a busy semester.
We make it personal. All our teaching begins in our App, and it learns about you as you learn about the Lab. It manages your safety credentials, points to your next opportunity, and guides you through your Lab-based projects. It is live, like this page, so it either points you to the next available slot (e.g., there are three lasers free from 11:00 tomorrow) or guides you through the learning you need to take first. You can search everything we offer to see what might interest you next, or find inspiration from the galleries of work made here. You'll also get a personal Lab Portfolio to share your own work.
The App shows what is free right now, and what each thing needs before it is yours to book.
The Lab is open to you throughout the semester for supervised drop-in making, wherever you have earned the credentials to work. We lead, partner, and facilitate technology-enhanced teaching across the campus, including our signature Technology Productions, where whole cohorts build and occupy something at scale. We are also a research instrument in our own right, extending what we learn through Knowledge Exchange and, this autumn, through our flagship, the Immersive Experience Lab.
Supervised drop-in making, all day, every day. The Lab is open to you throughout the semester. Wherever you've earned the credentials, you can work, with our team on hand to support you. A technology ecosystem where you can speculate, experiment, make, and create. Architectural prototypes, virtual production films, immersive learning, materials testing - whatever your work demands. The team provides and maintains the infrastructure, so you don't have to, and our progressive training keeps spaces full of industry-grade technology available to everyone. And every morning, before the doors open at 10:00, the team spends the first hour of the day making the Lab a little better than yesterday.
Technology-enhanced Teaching. We support curriculum teaching in three ways: we lead, we partner, and we facilitate. Our team designs and leads everything from multi-week practical classes to single-session Creative Making Workshops: authentic making projects that give coursework a physical dimension. We also partner with academics to deliver practical classes, combining our experience in technology-enhanced learning with their subject expertise. And built on the back of our foundational technology training, we facilitate teaching every day: our spaces, our technologies, and our team supporting the coursework students carry through our doors from the studios and classrooms.
The CAT LAB's signature teaching is our Technology Productions. Whole cohorts, working together to build something at scale and then occupy it, always ending in a public event and exhibition. Students progress rapidly through our courses and use what they learn to create something they can inhabit, applying academic ideas in ways they won't forget.
Research, in a living lab. Our ecosystem is built for research as much as teaching. Colleagues use the Lab to pursue their research questions, including building and testing prototypes with the Lab team's expertise on hand. Just as with our students, we do not operate the machines for you; we empower you to do it yourself. We provide the technology infrastructure, the training, and the expert advice. The research and the making are then yours to pursue.
The Lab is simultaneously an operational facility and an Action Research project. It is itself our longest experiment: a decade-long research programme in democratising technology, studied as it grows, driving continual improvement, with students and colleagues as both participants and contributors. We share what we learn, taking our democratisation mission beyond our own campus by publishing working models for others to adapt. Alongside this, our research focuses on the technology frontier itself: bridging the physical and digital realms through networked devices, real-time AI analytics, and immersive technology.
Knowledge Exchange. We extend our community beyond the university through public Making Workshops, professional short courses, community partnerships, and a full public engagement programme. And we publish what we make: our projects and the work they produce, a growing archive on the App.
Our flagship: the Immersive Experience Lab. Opening this autumn, the Immersive Experience Lab (IEL) is our new, room-sized technology instrument: an enveloping LED volume and ceiling, transformable immersive pods, spatial audio, and live sensing, all played through the Lab's own App. Step inside your research at 1:1 scale.
There are many ways in: visit as a Guest, join as a Member, train as a Maker, grow with the Team, or partner with us in research. One Lab, one App, one sign-in. However you arrive, the system knows you from then on, helping you go as far as you want.
Explore the Lab from anywhere: our spaces, our technologies (many interactive and in 3D), our materials library, and the archive of work. Come in person for exhibitions and public events.
Take part in public Making Workshops, use our Bureau services, and follow the work as it happens.
Westminster students and colleagues can train up, get hands-on with our technologies, and work independently on their own coursework and research.
Current Westminster students can apply to work with us as Lab Assistants and train through our Technologist Development Programme to become professional Technologists. Most of our team began exactly here.
Take part in our daily action-research experiment, or bring us a project at the frontier of the physical and the digital. We partner with academia, industry, technology suppliers, and the community. If you think we could work together usefully, we want to hear from you.
We build with technology, but we are grounded in ideas. Find out more about the philosophy, social theory, and behavioural science that underpin the Lab: start with our About pages, or go deeper at Fissure.work, where CAT LAB founder and Director Dr David Scott shares the thinking behind it all.
Everything starts in the App. The Lab in your pocket.