Richard Buchanan, a professor of design, management, and information systems, noted in an interview conducted by the ServiceD team that John Dewey can be seen as one of the first to speak about interaction design in his 1930 book, Art as Experience.
Interaction Design is “the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services.”.
In other words, we can say that Interaction Design is focused on making the interaction between humans and digital systems as enjoyable as possible.
It’s quite close to the field of ergonomics in a way, but here the focus is on digital tools. It is also like computer interaction design that will emerge a few decades later.
Going further
This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.