"A Design for Life" is a single released by Welsh band Manic Street Preachers in 1996 and the first to be taken from the Everything Must Go album of May that same year. It peaked and debuted at number 2 in the UK Singles Chart.

The title was inspired by the debut Joy Division EP record An Ideal for Living. The opening line of the song 'Libraries gave us power' was inspired by the legend at the top of the former library in Pillgwenlly, Newport, some 15 miles from the band's home town of Blackwood in Wales: 'Knowledge is Power'. The next line, 'then work came and made us free', refers to the German slogan Arbeit macht frei that featured above the gates of Nazi concentration camps and which had been used previously by the band in their song "The Intense Humming of Evil" on the album The Holy Bible.

The song explores themes of class conflict and working class identity and solidarity, inspired by the band's strong socialist convictions. Its video included scenes of fox hunting, Royal Ascot, a polo match and the Last Night of the Proms to represent what the band saw as class privilege. The video was directed by Pedro Romhanyi.

The song was the first to be written and released by the band following the mysterious disappearance of figurehead Richey Edwards the previous year and was used as the opening track on Forever Delayed, the band's greatest hits album released in November 2002. Interviewed in 2014 by NME for their "Song Stories" video series, singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield recalled that the lyric had been a fusion of two sets of lyrics — "Design for Life" and "Pure Motive" — sent to him from Wales by bassist Nicky Wire, while he was living in Shepherd's Bush. The music was written "in about ten minutes" and Bradfield felt a sense of euphoria with the result. The song was credited with having "rescued the band" from the despair felt after the disappearance of Edwards, with Wire describing the song as "a bolt of light from a severely dark place".

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