I'm an AI Designer
& Researcher.
I don't advise about AI from a distance. I ship alongside the teams building it.
I've been circling the same question for twenty years: what happens when people talk to machines? In 2014 I finished a PhD in Conversational AI, where I built conversational AI systems from scratch and observed sycophancy and reward hacking before the field had names for either. Then I spent fifteen years designing at scale — Google Maps for two billion people, Atlassian from pre-IPO to one of the most respected design teams in Australia, Trustpilot as VP of Design leading an AI transformation of a seventeen-year-old platform.
Deployment at that scale is where theory meets real humans. It teaches you what breaks.
Research and scale used to be separate tracks. Now they've converged. I build open-source tooling that lets designers and AI agents work as peers and thousands of designers use it. My thesis is simple: alignment is a design problem. Where humans meet AI is where the technology succeeds or fails for people.
Where the work
is happening.
I am a leader but also elbow deep in the code and material of design. I like to be where the work is happening, involved in the decisions and at the bleeding edge of the most ambiguous innovative ideas. I like to work fast, test things out, try them again and refine. I like to whiteboard and banter with my team mates. I like to celebrate the wins loudly and have a dogged determination to solve the problems I'm working with.
On the engineering team, in the repo, in review — not a partner org handing specs across a boundary and hoping.
I prototype at speed. The case gets made in a working thing you can use, not in a deck about a thing that might exist.
CLs into the codebase rather than a handoff. If I can build it, the design doesn't get lost in translation on the way to production.
Deployment at scale is where theory meets real humans. It teaches you what breaks — and that lesson doesn't arrive any other way.
What I'm building
right now.
A design system built to be read by agents, served over MCP. The interface is increasingly generated at runtime; this is what design systems become.
felt-uiThe trust primitives for agent products: plan visibility, tool calls, confidence, citations, graceful refusals. Accessible by default.
agent-readyA Figma plugin that scores how AI-readable your design files are.
agent-design-primerThirty thousand words on agentic UX. Free, citable, inclusive by default.
The other
practices.
I take meditation seriously, it allows me to have a happy life and get some much needed perspective. After many years of practice I completed the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, studying under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield.
I paint murals, photograph, doodle, draw, play Djembe, enjoy blacksmithing and glass blowing. I find making things really empowering and enjoy getting my hands dirty in the workshop or developing some film.
They are always calling, and I am most at ease on a very long hike. I've climbed a few mountains in my time and enjoy getting out there to be in nature and am not afraid of no showers for 5 days or more.
I've always been an ocean dweller, and feel passionately about whale and dolphin conservation and generally ocean conservation is close to my heart. I love being in the water, and my home in the Northern Beaches of Sydney allows me plenty of beach time.
I'm married to my wonderful wife Kate, and have a diva of a whippet called Jess. My family lives across the globe in the UK, Thailand, Australia and South Africa.
Interested to
learn more?
Get my whole portfolio by messaging me on LinkedIn and I'll send you the password and link.