Bill Cooper describes the origins of personas in this 2003 essay from the Cooper Journel.

"Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master. Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a “Persona How-to” manual, but a complete “How-to” on personas has yet to be written. I hope someday that one of the very accomplished architects at Cooper will write that book because they have developed the technique to a degree of sophistication well beyond my seminal efforts. I look forward to contributing to it."

In this blog post, Andy lays out the Skills and Traits necessary to become "employable" as a web designer.

"If you’re a student aspiring toward a career in Web design, I think it would be prudent to reassess your current education or degree plan to ensure that you’re actually employable by the time you leave school. From my observations, the vast majority of students emerging from university, design school, and trade school lack fundamental skills and understanding necessary for the Web design professions (in all forms: experience design, interaction design, marketing design, communication design, information design, etc…)."

A keynote by Bill Buxton at Interaction08.

The Design Eco-System or How Can We Design Great Products If We Don't First Design our Environment?

"Great ideas are not enough. In many ways, they are the easy part of design. The hard part is seeing those great ideas through to reality. But the weight of that hard part can be significantly lightened if one has the right tools, the right team, and is working in the right physical and cultural space. While this sounds obvious ? banal even, the reality is that in the technology sector, the eco-system in which much design takes place is not conducive to the task. Designers are generally significantly out-numbered by technical staff. Unless proper attention is paid to details, the resulting physical and cultural eco-system will be determined by those with the larger numbers. The end result pays the price.

This result is not due to any sinister objectives, rather than to human nature. The objective here is to point out the dynamic, what gets lost in the process and provide some thoughts on how to bring about change that benefits all."

Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with the human aspects of technology. His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film-making and music. Buxton's research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. n December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm Buxton Design, where his time was split between working for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students.

 From  Ferry den Dopper in Slideshare.net - "My notes from a workshop on Interaction Design & Psychology I attended in 2002"

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This is an article from the STC UUX Community Newsletter.

"On December 13, 2007, the Lone Star Chapter held a workshop given by Patrick Hofmann, a visual interaction designer for Google in Sydney, Australia. His talk was entitled "Pictures and Profits: The Return on Investment of Visual Information Design." As a trained technical writer and now designer, Mr. Hofmann travels internationally to share his passion for "visual language," the use of fewer words and more images to save costs and generate revenue by improving product documentation, training and, most importantly, usability for the customer."