The model in depth: what this Lab is, and why it is new. The intellectual and operational framework behind everything else.
The CAT LAB reframes technology provision itself as academic work: theory-grounded, research-active, pedagogically designed, user-centred. Not a service that operates technology for you, but a campus-wide environment where students and colleagues learn to put the full range of creative and advanced technology to work for them. It is a third kind of space, neither a technical service nor an academic department.
Technology is of marginal interest in itself. It matters as a medium for designing, learning, and thinking. We democratise creative and advanced technology, making it accessible to everyone, and empower people to put it to work for themselves.
Designed around the people who use it, not the technology it contains. The starting point is always what a student or colleague needs to do, and the technology follows.
Run by academics and technologists as one team, with learning built into the fabric of the Lab. Technology provision is treated as academic work, not a service desk.
Built for and with its community: students, colleagues, graduates, and researchers, whose work and ideas shape what the Lab becomes.
Academics and technologists work as one team, dissolving the divide that leaves so much university technology to gather dust. The Lab runs on a role of its own making, the technologist: technically fluent, academically purposed, developed from the Lab's own graduates. It is the role that makes the one-team model work.
Since 2013 the Lab has grown from a single 85m² workshop into a 2,000m² ecosystem of more than fifty technologies, serving the whole Marylebone campus. Over a decade of finding out what actually works for students. The IEL is the latest and greatest chapter.
The CAT LAB is a living laboratory, and its subject is itself: how to make technology open to everyone. We watch how people learn here, ask what helped and what got in the way, and change the Lab in response. That work is an action-research programme, and taking part is an open invitation to everyone who uses the Lab.
Comprehensive across the Marylebone campus, and reaching into the wider University selectively, on the Lab's own terms, featuring and supporting the work best suited to its environment, led by the CAT LAB team. Inclusive in spirit; in expert hands.
The Lab fosters commercialisation and spin-outs from its own community, students, graduates, and researchers, as a route from the Lab into the world. This connects naturally to Zone 29, the University's new enterprise and employment centre in the building beside the campus, which the Lab can feed and showcase.
Backed by the Office for Students, with the IEL recognised by RIBA as a world-class space, and many Quintin Hogg Trust grants won over the years.
A member of the SHED Network, convened at MIT, among an international group of pioneering university spaces.
Built with industry partners including L-Acoustics, AVStumpfl, and Daikin, alongside broader standing across the sector.