Civil and Structural Design: A Brief and Non-exhaustive Guide for

Beginners
1.

Understand the Client's or Project's requirement carefully

2.

Obtain Geotechnical (Soil) Investigation Report. If not already available, recommend

to carry out one on site

3.

Perform site investigation (physical and visual inspection) to know and understand
the nature of the site and possible site constraints and interface with any existing (to be
demolished) or adjacent structures or buildings

4.

Carry out investigation of existing, both overhead and below ground, services such as
power lines, pipelines, drainages, gas lines, archaelogic (historical) artefacts, ordnance, etc

5.

From the GI Report or Geotech Engineer's recommendation determine the Soil

Bearing Capacity

6.

Prepare a preliminary or schematic structural design (with plans r drawings) of the

building based on anticipated Deadload and Liveload only

7.

Use a basic factor, say 0.4DL or 0.5DL, as the estimated equivalent seismic lateral
load to be applied on your prelim structural analysis and design

8.

Do a prelimimary design of footings or foundations with some allowances in case of

unforseen loads that might come up during final design

9.

If footing is found ok, initially size up all structural elements such as columns/walls,
beams, slabs, etc

10.

Perform a more precise loading analysis based on the initial sizes and a practically
exact assumption of liveloads based on the code

11.

Perform Earthquake (Seismic) loading analysis -Static loadcase and Dynamic

Loadcase (Response Spectrum and Time History analysis, if necessary

12.

Perform Wind Loading analysis

13.

Do a model in STAAD or ETABS or SAP, etc for the Structural Analysis, incorporating
all the loads as analysed above

14.

Review the results, if found ok, then make a summary of the analysis output for you
final design (manual calculation) of the structural elements

15.

Otherwise, you may let the program do the design of the structural elements
automatically

16.
17.

Detail the structural elements on the drawing

Do not forget to carry out Designer's Health and Safety Risk Assessments at any
stage prior to final design