The Department of Informatics was formed in 2002 when the then-Department of Information and Computer Science became the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. Originally, the school housed two departments: the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Informatics. The Department of Statistics joined shortly thereafter.

The mission and values of the Department of Informatics can be traced back to well before 2002, with software engineering, human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work being key areas of strength at UC Irvine for decades. As one example, the term “The Irvine School” is widely recognized and refers to an intellectual perspective on information technology in complex organizational settings that emerged over the last three decades of the 20th century. As another example, graduate students and faculty here laid the foundations for REST and WebDAV, two architectural styles underlying critical elements of the modern World Wide Web.