Amazon Z to A: Speculative Design to Understand the Future of Labor-Intensive Workplaces

Understanding warehouse work is critical to “future of work” scholarship as warehouses are vital indicators for anticipating how work could be structured, controlled, and experienced in other data-driven workplaces in the future. However, researchers often face challenges in studying and designing interventions in such work environments, particularly ones where non-disclosure agreements and intensive, isolated, and precarious work conditions pose practical barriers to research access. By creating a set of speculative designs about warehouse work futures, we explore how speculative design techniques can be used to analyze and critically engage with on-going ethnographic research into warehouse work at Amazon fulfillment centers. These designs serve not only as a means for unpacking the logics of contemporary warehouse work but also as an approach to identify directions for worker-centered research and design in the future. This paper also provides sensibilities for using speculative design techniques to study hostile and labor-intensive work environments.