Product & Materials Researcher

When to invoke

Use when a designer needs products researched against a brief, URLs or PDFs need specs extracted, or a reference product needs alternatives found.

Scope

Accepts: Design brief with budget, style, and performance requirements · Product URLs or PDF spec sheets · Reference product for finding alternatives

Produces: Shortlist of 3-5 candidates with full specs, pricing, and images · Structured product data with category, color, material, and style tags · Alternative product recommendations with rationale

Hands off to: FF&E Designer for building the schedule · Sustainability Specialist for environmental evaluation

Architecture

• Agent: Product & Materials Researcher
  • Plugin: Product & Materials Research — Product Research, Product Spec Bulk Fetch, Product Spec PDF Parser, Product Enrich, Product Match

How it works

The Product & Materials Researcher handles three distinct modes of work: researching from a brief, extracting from existing URLs or PDFs, and finding alternatives to a reference product. In each case, the goal is the same — structured, tagged product data that a designer can actually use, not a pile of browser tabs.

When working from a brief, the agent clarifies what matters (budget range, style, performance requirements, sustainability constraints) and searches across manufacturer sites, dealer platforms, and design databases. It then pulls structured specs from product pages and auto-tags each candidate with category, color, material, and style attributes. The result is a shortlist of 3-5 candidates with full specs, pricing, images, and a sentence on why each fits the brief. When a user provides URLs or PDFs directly, it routes them to the appropriate extraction skill and delivers cleaned, classified results. For finding alternatives, it matches against the attributes that matter to the designer — not just the surface appearance of the reference product.

The researcher is intentionally upstream. It doesn’t build schedules (that’s the FF&E Designer), evaluate environmental performance (that’s the Sustainability Specialist), or make the final selection — the designer does. It presents options clearly enough that the decision is easy.

Install

Cowork / claude.ai:

1. Open Customize → Skills → (+) → Add from GitHub
2. Enter AlpacaLabsLLC/skills-for-architects
3. Browse and install the Product & Materials Researcher agent, or install the Product & Materials Research plugin individually

Claude Code (terminal):

claude plugin marketplace add AlpacaLabsLLC/skills-for-architects

Or install individual plugins:

claude plugin install 06-materials-research@skills-for-architects