Abstract: An important characteristic of an affine space is that each of its hyperplanes is itself an affine space of one dimension lower. This property plays an essential part in the analysis of the structure of affine spaces. The purpose of this paper is to develop an analogous structure theory for general affine designs. This enables the introduction of a concept of dimension for affine designs and also yields techniques for constructing affine designs from smaller ones. The initial sections introduce the required basic results and terminology. In w is proved the main decomposition theorem which demonstrates how an affine design may be constructed with a given decomposition into sets of smaller affine designs. The results of this paper form part of my doctoral thesis at the University of London. To my supervisor Professor D.R. Hughes, I am indebted for invaluable assistance and guidance.