The Horwood Language Centre at the University of Melbourne has recently installed a large Macintosh multimedia laboratory, dedicated to the learning of languages. This has proved an enormously popular facility, both for teachers and students. After only four months of operation, booking requests by teachers for the second semester of 1993 have exceeded capacity by one and a half times; students often queue to use the machines when the laboratory is open for self access.

When the Language Centre began assembling the original submission to the University for funding for the laboratory, Centre staff were still relatively inexperienced in the design and installation of CALL laboratories, and the decision was taken to make extensive use of experts in FT and multimedia presentation within Melbourne University. However, despite this expert assistance, a number of unexpected problems presented themselves, some of which were potentially disastrous to the project.

As a result, the Language Centre has learned a number of valuable lessons about CALL laboratory design. This paper presents some of the more important of these lessons, in the hope that they will be of assistance to any other institutions who may be contemplating the installation of a CALL laboratory in the near future.