The development of successful design standards: understanding the challenges

The current generation of design standards in the construction sector has reached a high level of complexity, which reflects negatively on the quality of design standards and as a result on the efficient communication of technical provisions to users. Recently, the desire to improve quality and usability of design standards has become increasingly strong; in fact, enhancing the ‘ease of use’ will be a major focus in the development of the next generation of the Structural Eurocodes, scheduled to be completed by 2020. In this paper the authors outline the state-of-the-art of the concepts of quality and usability applied to design standards. A basic framework to start investigating these concepts is proposed and a real case study to explore the issue of quality in design standards is presented. This research shows that several challenges need to be overcome in pursuing the above goals and that further research is needed.