Join us in shaping the future of Amazon's revolutionary products! As a Sr. Cultural Researcher on the Futures Insights team, which is part of Amazon's Devices and Services Experience Design organization, you'll play a pivotal role in informing mid-to-long term strategic planning (3-5 years) for next-generation and net-new device and service innovations. Your research will help the organization situate emerging technologies within a deep understanding of enduring and emerging human needs, cultural trends, and broader systems (e.g., STEEP analysis). Our work begins at the start of the design process, identifying insights and opportunities to drive humanity-centered innovation throughout. We collaborate with a variety of teams and functions in our work, driving efforts that are at times embedded within futures concept explorations or independent of them.
We recognize that the combination of skills and experience required to do this work can take many forms. Maybe you're a design ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, futures researcher, strategic foresight analyst, design strategist, or user experience researcher with deep experience in the 0-1 product space? Either way, we'd love to hear from you if this role sounds exciting.
Key job responsibilities
Key job responsibilities
- Plan and execute global, in-field research programs on topics of strategic relevance to the organization, leading the output and activities of the project's lifecycle (e.g., screener development to final insight reports)
- Help the Futures Insights team build and scale mechanisms for collecting, synthesizing, and communicating strategic cultural insights on human needs and motivations, and sociocultural trends
- Collaborate with product, brand and design teams across the org to translate emerging insights and trends into next-gen or net new capabilities, devices experiences, value propositions, or innovation pathways
- Help leadership determine the right research questions to ask, informing long-term research roadmaps that align with business strategy and goals
A day in the life
In this role, you'll dive deep into understanding human needs, behaviors, motivations, and sociocultural trends to inform futures design explorations or broader organizational strategy. Your work will consist of two major types: 1) driving independent cultural and futures research programs around themes of strategic relevance to the organization and 2) working with product and design partners to translate and activate futures research in near-term product design workstreams.
To that end, your day-to-day might consist of:
- Closely partnering with the Devices & Services Design teams to shape concept development and experience roadmaps.
- Leading in-home customer interviews in Brazil, talking to academic experts about social robotics, or exploring the fringes of cultures for emerging signals and trends.
- Creating the artifacts necessary to plan and deliver insights (e.g., screeners, discussion guides, insights reports), as well as artifacts and activities necessary to help activate them.
- Planning and facilitating workshops to help teams immerse in and design with the insights surfaced by your work.
About the team
The Futures Insights team is a research team within a larger design research team inside Amazon's Devices and Services Experience Design organization. Our team is split across our New York and London studios. We draw on a variety of methods and disciplines to inform our work: strategic foresight, cultural analysis, ethnography, and design research methods.
The Devices and Services Design Research team is a collaborative group of ethnographers, psychologists, human factors researchers, and research scientists dedicated to providing deep insights into customer motivations and behaviors. The broader team's research supports multiple time horizons, with product line research teams influencing existing roadmaps and Futures Insights shaping the furthest out time horizons. Collectively, we work closely with business and design partners to clarify opportunities, inspire innovation, and translate insights into operational outcomes.
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