Thoughts on Interaction Design was published in 2007 by Brown Bear LLC. With a print run of only 1000 copies, this book quickly sold out and is now out of print.
However, the book has been adopted by Morgan Kaufmann, and you can now buy it online!
Designers have long since bemoaned their lack of representation in industry—they claim to be misunderstood, underpaid, and relegated to stylist or pixel pusher. If Designers are, in fact, stylists, then they deserve to be paid to style: to create a temporary visual feeling that is transient and cheap. But Interaction Design is not about a transient aesthetic. A "cool flash interface" defines Interaction Design in the same way that accounting defines strategic business development—not at all. Interaction Designers are trained to observe humanity and to balance complicated ideas, and are used to thinking in opposites: large and small, conceptual and pragmatic, human and technical. This is not a jack of all trades. Instead, it is a shaper of behavior. Behavior is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue.
Human behavior is innately poetic; it is natural, and thus resonates poetic in the same way that does a flower, or a bird, or a tree. It is through our own design of objects, services and systems that we may have disturbed the poetry. A focus on technology or aesthetics alone creates a world of ideas that often seems discretely disconnected from humanity. Through the combination of technology, aesthetics and humanity, we will find a world of Interaction Design. And Interaction Design, as the study of dialogue between people and things, will bring harmony to technological advancement.