A new concept called an ordered set of design earthquake-strain functions is introduced for the earthquake-strain constrained designs of a distributed parameter structure. Based on this concept, an efficient numerical method is proposed for inversely sweeping out an ordered set of earthquake-strain constrained design functions with respect to a parameter which specifies a sequence of design strain functions. The process of sweeping out the designs is first formulated with Gateaux differentiation of the implicit nonlinear mapping. All the governing equations and the inverse mapping are discretized by the Rayleigh-Ritz method in the numerical procedure. With this method, a set of candidate designs and various design charts may easily be supplied for designers. In the examples, several ordered sets of earthquake response curvature constrained beams with various support conditions are generated, and the characteristics of the designs are discussed. © 1992.