Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology and Design is based on a selected subset of papers from the International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS) held at Kloster Irsee, Germany in 2009. There, the latest formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work on spoken dialogue systems technology were discussed among researchers and developers in the area from both industry and academia. The IWSDS workshop provides, since 1999, a regular forum for the presentation of research in the discourse and dialogue area to both the larger Spoken Dialogue Systems community, as well as to researchers outside this community.