The terms design computing and other relevant terms including design and computation and computational design refer to the study and practice of design activities through the application and development of novel ideas and techniques in computing. One of the early groups to coin this term was the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney in Australia, which for nearly forty years (late 1960s to early 2000s) pioneered in the research, teaching, and consulting of design and computational technologies.

This group organised the academic conference series "Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID)" published by Springer during that period. AID was later renamed "Design Computing and Cognition (DCC)" and is currently a leading biannual conference in the field. Other notable groups in this area are the Design and Computation group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture + Planning and the Computational Design group at Georgia Tech.

Whilst these terms share in general an interest in computational technologies and design activity, there are important differences in the various approaches, theories, and applications. For example, while in some circles the term Computational Design refers in general to the creation of new computational tools and methods in the context of Computational Thinking, Design Computing is concerned with bridging these two fields in order to build an increased understanding of design.