This text has positioned Interaction Design in a way that emphasizes the intellectual facets of the discipline. It has discussed the role that language, argument, and rhetoric play in the design of products, services, and systems. Uday Gajendar has examined various academic approaches to thinking about Design, with the conclusion that the Designer is a liberal artist left to infuse empathy in technologically driven products. This idea of language is extended to poetry, and the text has introduced the idea of a poetic interaction—an interaction that affects not only the mind and body, but also the soul.

The text has also examined the tools and techniques used by practitioners in their day-to-day experiences. These include methods for structuring large quantities of data, and ways of thinking about users, and approaches for thinking about human behavior as it unfolds over time. The toolkit for Interaction Designers is full of methods for connecting people and data; particular software packages are incidental, as the true value Interaction Designers can provide is in their process and method. Justin Petro discussed ways in which he has used these visual tools, techniques, and methods to communicate with business leaders and with clients.

Finally, the text has introduced the idea of Interaction Design as an integral facet of the business development process. Chris Connors described the success he had working in tandem with engineers, while Ellen Beldner examined some of the trials and tribulations of working with product managers. Interaction Design, when successful, is positioned as a critical component of product development, not as some ancillary service that is called in at the end of a project.

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.