Planning in general and urban-regional plan preparationrnin particular is now becoming increasingly an informationrnintensive activity so much so that the success of thernplanning exercise depends on the availability ofrnadequate, timely and reliable information. In Third Worldrncountries including Ethiopia, information intensivernactivities like planning are very much affected by poorrninformation support services.rnIt is in this context that this study deals with therndesign of an information support system that can providerninformation tailored to the needs of NUPI's planners,rnresearchers and other professional staff involved in thernpreparation of urban-regional plans. The study employedrna structured method of system analysis and designrntechnique. The required data to design the system wererncollected by questionnaire survey, interviews andrnobservations.rnThe design of the system was preceded by analysis of thernexisting system problems and suggestions for preliminaryrnproblem solutions. The study reveals that the existingrnsystem does not have a well-established data processingrnprocedure resulting, at times, in the underutilizationrnand improper use of information collected at high cost.The users' information requirements were identified asrnthe prime basis for the design of the new system. Therninformation required by NUPI is very diversifiedrnincluding economic, population, services, naturalrnresources, crop production, land use, etc. It coversrnalmost all human experience, generally. In order tornsatisfy users' information requirement, the systemrnfunctions such as sample data processing and maprnpreparation that are applied to process the raw data intornusable forms are described and documented with the helprnof data flow diagrams and a set of algorithmrndescriptions, referred to as logical system design.rnBasing on the logical system, the design of the physicalrnsystem was developed for implementation which includesrngeneration and selection of system al ternati ves, andrndesign of prototype output, input data elements, andrndatabase. In general terms, the system design proposed inrnthis study can help in partly alleviating the existingrnproblems. The study recommends other system designrnprojects to bring about complete solutions to thernprevailing problems.