# Felt Labs

> Felt Labs is MC Dean's studio for design × AI: open-source skills, commands, and primers that teach AI coding agents design craft, plus weekly essays on designing what AI feels like.

Felt Labs works from one thesis: alignment is a design problem. How AI behaves, what it feels like to work with, and whether people can trust it are questions of design, not just engineering. The studio builds open-source materials that make design knowledge legible to AI agents, and publishes writing that helps designers move from decorating interfaces to shaping behavior.

## About MC

MC Dean is an Australian designer and researcher based in London, working on human–AI interaction. She is a Staff Designer at Google, leading design strategy across AI-powered shopping experiences. She holds a PhD in Conversational AI (2011), with early empirical work on sycophancy and reward hacking in chatbot systems, findings that anticipated core questions in modern AI alignment. Her earlier career spans Google Maps, six years at Atlassian, and Trustpilot, where she was VP of Design and Research.

Long-standing interests in deep ecology, biomimicry, and conservation technology run through her work, and explain why she writes about AI as an organism rather than a tool. She writes Percolates, a weekly Substack on design and AI, speaks internationally on AI and design (including Chatham House), and is working on a book, Simmerdin.

## Research

- MX Heuristics: Twelve machine-experience heuristics organized around five agent needs (perceive, orient, act, verify, collaborate), written for both human designers and AI agents.
- Taste Clone: An ongoing experiment in whether personal design taste can be captured, evaluated, and transferred to AI systems, with academic publication in progress.

## Open Source

The Felt Labs materials library spans 145 skills, 63 commands, and 20 plugins across its repositories.

- [designer-skills](https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills): The core library of design skills for AI coding agents, covering craft from typography to accessibility.
- [habitat](https://github.com/Owl-Listener/habitat): An agent-readable design system starter with an MCP server, built so agents can perceive and use design tokens directly.
- [mood-protocol](https://github.com/Owl-Listener/mood-protocol): A visual-to-semantic bridge that turns a moodboard into a structured mood.md an agent can act on.
- [llm-ux-patterns](https://github.com/Owl-Listener/llm-ux-patterns): Interaction patterns for LLM-powered products.

## Tools

- Agent Ready: A Figma plugin that scores a design file's agent-readiness across 13 checks.

## Writing

- [Percolates](https://percolates.substack.com): Weekly essays on what AI feels like, and what designers should do about it.

## Contact

MC welcomes conversations about speaking, advisory work, research collaboration, and contributions to the open-source library.

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcdean)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Owl-Listener)