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."

Here is a presentation from Bill DeRouchey from IxDA's Interaction 08 conference this month.  To learn more and to read the commentary from this presentation, follow the link to Bill's The Language of Interaction website.

Abstract - "We are interaction designers during a time of rapid technological change, placing us in the incredible position of collectively creating and curating a new language, the language of interaction. The explosion of products with interfaces means that people have to continually adapt and learn new things. They will have to read each interface and look for clues, common visual elements that they've seen before. They'll subconsciously look for a language that comprises words, sounds, colors, shapes, icons, motion, gestures, priorities, hierarchies and more. We are the custodians of this language, creating and curating it organically. We need to start seeing it everywhere and learn from each other as we define the future relationship between people and technology."

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Jesse James Garrett put together this Elements of User Experience in 2000 - and it is still applicable today.

"A basic duality: The Web was originally conceived as a hypertextual information space;
but the development of increasingly sophisticated front- and back-end technologies has
fostered its use as a remote software interface. This dual nature has led to much confusion,
as user experience practitioners have attempted to adapt their terminology to cases beyond
the scope of its original application. The goal of this document is to define some of these
terms within their appropriate contexts, and to clarify the underlying relationships among
these various elements."

It's also available from JJG's website at this link.

"It’s important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design, or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral–about why and when rather than about what and how." 

The key foundations according to David are time (pace, reaction, context), metaphor, abstraction, and negative space.

Read more in this article from Boxes and Arrows.

This is the keynote presentation from experience designer expert, Peter Boersma, at the Italian IA Summit on February 24, 2006.  Peter works for Info.nl, one of the older interactive design agencies in The Netherlands.

The slides have been embedded below or are available from the Click To View link above the rating stars.

This Boxes and Arrows article is a review of a new book on Interaction Design called Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction.  This book is being released at a time when acceptance of Interaction Design as a discipline is reaching a critical mass.  Clifton concludes "Interaction Design, the book, presents many valuable approaches and background on the industry. Still, one should realize that learning this material is like learning to play the piano."

Here are the primary principles of interaction design, including the all important Fitts' Law, as presented by Bruce Tognazzini in his AskTog blog.  Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, the "dream team" firm specializing in human-computer interaction.

"The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important."

This is a new article from UX Matters about interaction design. 

Here is Kevin's description of the article - "This article is not meant to be prescriptive, but reflective. Questioning is an integral part of design. It is the essence of the beginner’s mind—an important quality of a designer. Design is all around us. We see it in the products we use, the cars we drive, and the homes we live in. As interaction designers, we can borrow from other disciplines, but we should also be reflective and wander down our own paths.".

This is a great overview of the topic of User Experience by Kevin Mireles.