Senior Futures Design Strategist (US Remote)

Motorola Solutions•Chicago, IL

4d•Remote

About The Position

Motorola Solutions is hiring a Senior Futures Design Strategist for its Futures Insights Team, a research-led futures and strategic foresight pod within the UX Research organization. The team works across user experience research, strategic foresight, design, and business strategy, exploring uncertainty and emerging behaviors to identify strategic opportunities for the company. The strategist will shape Horizon 3 product opportunities with a 5–10+ year outlook, making future concepts tangible through artifacts, interfaces, and narratives, then translating them into actionable business opportunities. As the team’s primary design-focused individual contributor, this person will connect futures work with the teams responsible for exploring and building concepts, ensuring promising ideas have a credible next step and a clear owner. The role includes collaboration across US and European time zones and travel for in-person research as needed. Candidates may reside anywhere in the United States.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years in UX research or design strategy, and 3+ years in design strategy, speculative design, innovation strategy, or strategic foresight within a product strategy team, consultancy, or incubation setting.
Portfolio evidence of tangible future artifacts and frameworks grounded in human-centered research, with evidence that the work advanced to funded exploration, product roadmaps, pilots, or new ventures.
Deep expertise in speculative design, design fiction, and scenario building, with exceptional visual craft using tools or approaches such as Figma, FigJam, physical prototyping, or video narrative.
Working fluency in business value creation and capture, including business model design, market and competitive dynamics, and risk/return.
Practical command of foresight and research methods, including scenario planning, backcasting, STEEP, causal layered analysis, and Delphi.
Proven ability to guide R&D, product, and design teams through futures work without direct authority.
Willingness to travel for in-person research when needed and collaborate across US and European time zones.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) or equivalent professional expertise in Design Futures, Strategic Foresight, HCI, Anthropology, Systems Design, or a related field.
Experience in a design-led consultancy, corporate innovation or new ventures group, or incubation setting.
Experience using or building AI tools for signal scanning, trend tracking, and synthesizing unstructured data.
Experience researching complex socio-technical systems, such as mobility, health, or organizational analysis; public safety, government, or enterprise security experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Create future-state artifacts, including mock interfaces, speculative journey maps, and world-building narratives, to help users and stakeholders explore and test concepts before investment.
Translate future concepts into business opportunities by defining value propositions, target users, business models, competitive positioning, key assumptions, and relevance to Motorola Solutions.
Scope Strategic Opportunity Briefs, run activation workshops, and transition validated concepts to downstream R&D, product, and incubation teams with a clear next step and owner.
Present strategic options, trade-offs, and risks to C-suite and senior leaders, recommending which futures to invest in, monitor, or set aside.
Partner with researchers to ground concepts in human needs and market and technology context.
Contribute to AI-assisted signal scanning and facilitate foresight methods, including STEEP, CLA, and Delphi, to turn weak signals into design hypotheses.
Mentor peers, raise the quality of experiential design, and demonstrate how futures work creates strategic option value across the company.