Design procedures serve as guides to the orderly consideration of all relevant aspects of a design problem. Sound procedures can promote uniformly good performance of structures, in both a technical and economic sense. Incomplete or erroneous procedures can obviously promote faulty performance. It is worth noting, however, that either good or bad design guides, tables and so forth may stifle creativity if viewed and used in a dogmatic, rigid fashion. Though many relatively unsophisticated design procedures have been used in the past to select dimensions for the road pavement structure, it is now obvious that for developed countries the rate of expenditure for new roads and major improvements, the rate of traffic growth and the availability of new materials all suggest a very high order of efficiency in this design process as being required for the future. Unfortunately such efficiency has been elusive, in part for the reason that roadbuilding has been, and continues to be, very much an "art", but also because research and development efforts have not followed a consistent, systematic plan of attack. The problems have been too numerous, too urgent and too multidisciplinary in nature while the research and deveIopment efforts have been too fragmented to permit such an approach. It would seem that improved pavement design methods can be developed only within a carefully structured framework. This framework must reflect an awareness of the very rich resources of past road research, treat the unique conditions of actual roadbuilding practice, and have a breadth and flexibility that modern systems engineering makes possible. The purpose of this paper is to make contributions to the deveIopment of a framework such as that noted above for Sweden. It contains a selective review of recent USA (and some other) literature treating principal elements of the pavement design process, some examples of the systems approach to pavement design, and examples of current pavement design procedures. It was felt that in these areas a person with no experience in Sweden might nevertheless offer something of value to the total effort.