Lugh

A project about craft, admin, and where work gets done.

Lugh takes on the administrative side of running a small craft practice (email, quoting, time and materials, opportunity hunting) without asking the maker to leave the bench.

Developed at NCAD as my MA thesis, it includes primary research with working makers, an agentic system built on Claude and n8n, and a physical device made in the workshop.

A sector that is economically significant and personally fragile.

Irish craft employs around 63,000 people and turns over €11.3B a year, but 88% of it is sole traders and micro-enterprises. Across the UK and Ireland, average craft income is under £20,000, with more than half of makers earning less than £10,000.

The gap between those two sets of numbers is where the project starts.

The entrepreneurial burden of the practice.

“The admin doesn't sit alongside the practice. It comes out of it.”From the maker interviews

The problem isn't the admin, it's the context.

The screen is the interruption. Opening an app isn't neutral, it's a context switch. It pulls attention away from the material, and the return isn't free either: notifications, tabs, everything else competing for the same glance. The problem isn't the difficulty of the task. It's where it forces the maker's attention to go.

An agent you talk to, that never asks you to look at anything.

A single voice agent, Lugh, delivered through two touchpoints: a wearable clip that captures the maker's voice, and a walnut-finished wood dock that lives in the workshop, speaks back, and signals its state through ambient light. Every interaction is entirely screenless.

Claude sits at the centre as the reasoning layer, connected to Gmail, Drive and n8n to carry out what's asked, while a dashboard brings together everything gathered along the way for the moments the maker does sit down.

Claude decides what should happen. n8n does it.

pyAudio captures the maker’s voice Vosk hears the wake word and turns speech into text Playwright fills the chatbox with the request ElevenLabs turns the reply into audio and plays it Claude

Google
Sheets Gmail Google
Calendar Google
Drive

Each n8n workflow is triggered by Claude through MCP and backed by Google Sheets, keeping the system inspectable outside the agent. Calendar and Gmail skip n8n entirely: both are reached through Claude's native MCP connectors, since they already expose the exact actions needed as structured tools.

Workflow	Route	What it does
Time tracking	n8n	Starts, stops, pauses or resumes a timer; pausing and resuming let a maker step away and pick the same timer back up rather than restarting it
To-do list	n8n	Adds a task, marks one done, or lists pending tasks formatted to be spoken aloud
Opportunities finder	n8n	Runs on a daily schedule rather than on request. Pulls listings from DCCI, Feltmakers and OLIST, merges and deduplicates them, and saves only new entries
Accountability: data entry	n8n	Logs new projects, costs, revenues and fixed costs
Accountability: data query	n8n	Reads that data back, from a project summary to a running list of fixed costs
Invoice generation	n8n	Fills a Drive template with company and invoice details, exports it as a PDF, and logs the new invoice
Calendar	MCP (Claude)	Checks today’s schedule, creates or updates events
Gmail	MCP (Claude)	Reads a message, drafts a reply, sends once confirmed

The split is invisible to the maker. Both routes are the same spoken exchange with the same agent.

Built as a workshop tool, not a tech object.

Pine, mitred at forty-five degrees so the seams disappear, walnut stain, fabric over the speaker and the acrylic eyes. Speaker, micro:bit, battery and LED rings under a removable face, running with no cables at all.

Closer to a small robot than a speaker. An object with a face asks for permission more honestly.Makers are protective of their space

What the eyes say

A secondary support, not where the work happens.

The primary workflow belongs at the bench. But the agent accumulates things worth looking at, and every maker eventually sits down. Every section traces back to a research finding: the pricing uncertainty that kept coming up in interviews produced both the time tracking and the accountability section.

Beyond checking in, the dashboard is where the maker can review what the agent logged and correct it by hand: fixing an entry, editing a record, or entering something the agent missed.

[ Site map ]

Voice Agent Dashboard

Topbar · Navigation · Profile · Settings

01

Dashboard

Home · Overview

1. 1.1

   Greeting

   Dynamic greeting message

2. 1.2

   Opportunities preview

   Visibility · Grants · Others columns

3. 1.3

   Calendar widget

   Month grid, selected day and session count

4. 1.4

   To-do widget

   Preview of pending tasks

5. 1.5

   Hours chart

   Hours-worked ring + legend

6. 1.6

   Accountability rings

   Costs / revenue rings with month navigation

02

Actions

Hub: workspace picker

1. 2.1

   Accountability

   • Tabs: Projects · Costs · Invoices
   • Costs: fixed/variable, filter, export
   • Invoices: list + income toggle
   • Edit-project modal
2. 2.2

   Calendar

   • Month / Week view
   • Day grid + events
   • Upcoming events
   • Month navigation
3. 2.3

   To-do list

   • High / Medium / Low columns
   • Task-completion checkboxes
   • Previous (completed) list
4. 2.4

   Communications

   • Main list
   • Starred list
   • Instagram, Gmail, WhatsApp navigation bar
5. 2.5

   Time manager

   • Tabs: Stats · Tasks · Projects
   • Period: Week / Month / Year / Custom
   • Task & project charts
   • Min/max stats per task & project
6. 2.6

   Opportunities

   • Visibility · Grants · Others columns
   • Starred / Past filters
   • Per-site filters
   • Archive opportunity

03

Agent

Voice assistant: Lugh

1. 3.1

   Chat with Lugh

   • Message thread
   • Text input field
   • Send message
   • Voice input (microphone)
2. 3.2

   Quick actions

   • “Give me an overview”
   • “New project”

04

Extensions

Google integrations

1. 4.1

   Gmail

   • Connection status
   • Detail panel
   • Recheck connection
2. 4.2

   Google Calendar

   • Connection status
   • Detail panel
   • Recheck connection
3. 4.3

   Google Sheets

   • Connection status
   • Detail panel
   • Recheck connection
4. 4.4

   FAQ

   • Why share Sheets with a service account?
   • Why did Gmail/Calendar stop working?
   • What is n8n and why does it matter?
   • Is everything here data?
   • How do I revoke access later?
5. 4.5

   Video walkthrough

   • How to connect Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, n8n
   • Onboarding help

Wherever a card shows data from Gmail, Calendar or Sheets, an “Open in Gmail”, “Open in Calendar” or “Open in Sheets” button sits beside it. The dashboard was built to complement those tools, not replace them, so a maker who wants the real thing is always one click away from it.

A palette drawn from the object itself.

Three rounds, alongside three prototype stages.

Lugh.

Next steps.

The dock itself could be tailored to the maker, proportions and materials adapted to a ceramicist's studio, a leatherworker's bench, a jeweller's desk, so the object fits the practice rather than the practice adapting to it.

More broadly, the same agentic approach (screenless, voice-first, nothing acted on without confirmation) isn't specific to craft.

Design Rationale.