VIRTUAL CONFERENCE Panelist, Denique Ferguson

Denique Ferguson, recovering know-it-all and inveterate nerd has an MSc. in Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCID), and she’s not afraid to use it. Denique currently hones her craft as a Senior Service Designer at the SlashRoots Foundation, researching, practising, and occasionally teaching user experience and service design principles. She has conducted design research among a variety of cultures and institutions, including Kingston (Jamaica), Kampala (Uganda), and Cape Town (South Africa).

After studying Electronics and Social Marketing at the University of the West Indies, she worked as a Business Analyst, gathering requirements, conducting user acceptance tests, and becoming increasingly impatient with development approaches that too often led to technically functional but painful to use software. This experience spurred her to pursue the MSc. at Indiana University Bloomington—a degree most of the people in her life never heard of until she decided to study it. 

Working at SlashRoots appealed to the Fulbright alumna's desire to use human-centred design to address civic and social problems, such as strengthening citizen participation in governance in Jamaica. At the SlashRoots Foundation, Denique helps the team define and explore problem spaces, planning and managing the research, communication and prototyping activities that turn who’s, what’s, how’s and why’s into how-we-might’s. 

Denique believes that everyone can and should get involved with technology, especially if they are not "techies". Technology affects so much of our lives so deeply: at a policy level, the decisions about what we should (and should not) do with it are too important to be left to developers alone; and at the individual level, it offers each of us opportunities to apply our talents in previously unexpected ways.