The Eclectic Design Research Group began when a group of students who took Associate Professor Michael Twidale’s LIS 590CW Computer Supported Cooperative Work class in Fall of 2002 started meeting with him on a semi-regular basis the following January (2003) in order to continue discussions begun in the class. It turned into an informal discussion group where individual students would talk about their current ideas or research in order to get feedback from Professor Twidale and their fellow students. When Professor Twidale went on sabbatical in 2003-2004, the meetings ceased, but on his return, the students who had been meeting with him, along with some new students who were taking some of his classes, felt that they missed having the informal meetings, and so they created a more fomal group they called the CSCW group. The CSCW group was defined by membership on a mailing list, and grew to include a number of people with a variety of interests from several departments at UIUC, including the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), the Department of Educational Psychology (EdPsych), and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

In the Fall of 2006, the CSCW Group was renamed the Eclectic Design Research Group in an effort to make the name more inclusive of the variety of interests that were represented in the group, and the variety of topics that were discussed in group meetings.