Infrastructure projects including roads, aviation, rail, water, housing and urban development projects, are key in improving the living standards of community members and ensuring economic growth. However, despite their increase in number over the years, infrastructure development projects have been portraying poor sustainability as they are characterized by stagnation, cost and time overrun. Most completed projects stop operations shortly after the exit of the financiers. Even though, project design is considered an important phase of a project, most project managers and stakeholders do not consider project design as an important phase of a project life cycle. As such, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of Participatory project design on sustainability of infrastructure development projects. This seminar paper analyzed five articles on the project design and sustainability of projects. Convergent analysis was conducted to identify similarities and divergent analysis was done to identify differences in conceptualization, methodology and findings. The results indicated that project designs have an effect on performance of projects. However, project managers in both the developed and developing countries are not including project design during construction process hence resulting to cost overrun, schedule delays and productivity loss. Further, common changes in project designs include errors and omission in design, change of plan by clients, incomplete contract document, change of requirements/specifications, differing site conditions, unforeseen ground conditions and changes in government regulation. The study also found that impacts of design change include completion schedule delay, increase in project cost, and wastage of materials during rework, productivity degradation and working extra hours (overtime) to meet deadlines of the project. Most of the studies on project design have used different dependents variables such as performance, building safety and cost among others. The study therefore recommends further studies should be carried out on project design and sustainability of projects used as the dependent variable.