LaBS is our own lab. Most of the studio's time goes on client work. Keynote and conference content, LED and screen content, interactive installations, live event production, signage, interfaces and websites. LaBS is the other track. It is where we build for ourselves: our own products, our own tools, small product ideas we want to test. No brief, no client sign-off, no show date.

Why a services studio keeps a lab

Client projects are scoped and dated. You solve the problem in front of you, hand it over, and move on to the next one. The useful part often gets left behind. A small piece of tooling written to get a screen build out of the door. A way of handling recognition data. A control layer that kept a stage in sync. That work usually stays in the project folder. LaBS is where it gets a second life. We take it, strip out whatever was specific to one client, and rebuild it so we can use it again. Some of it turns into a product. The rest stays internal and saves us time on the next job.

Not all of it works, and we would rather say so. We have built prototypes that looked fine on a desk and fell apart in a venue. Real light, real distances, people walking past at speed. We have started tools that ended up slower than doing the job by hand. Those get written up and dropped. That is the argument for keeping the lab separate from client work: a dead end costs us our own time, not someone's event. What survives gets used, and some of it turns up later in the work we deliver.