The existing design methods for passive energy dissipation systems with visco-elastie dampers are either complex or of biggish errors. This paper presents a displacement-based design method for energy dissipation systems with visco-elastic dampers. According to the correlativity between the damping coefficient of viseo-elastie dampers and their stiffness, the paper directly determines the expected supplemental damping ratio through simple iteration, thus simplifying the structure design of visco-elastic dampers. This method can be applied to new energy dissipation systems and seismic retrofitt...