Abstract: The paper discussed the collaborative design standard based on Industry Foundation Class (IFC). It was found that the collaborative design standard should be based on an open industrial standard instead of any private standard. IFC is the available open standard for the building industry. However the IFC open data standard is a necessary condition for the collaborative design standard but not a sufficient condition. It was pointed out in the paper that the process of the collaborative design need also clearly defined in the standard. The paper also introduced the Information Delivery Manual, a use case based methodology to analyze the design process, and Model View Definition, a programmer view of the data exchange within the process. This article points out, based on the IFC data standard framework, the collaborative design standard should include three aspect, namely, IFC data structure, information delivery manual, and model view definition.