Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a powerful declarative programmingparadigm that has been successfully applied to many dierent domains.Recently, ASP has also proved successful for hard optimization problems likecourse timetabling. In this paper, we approach another important task, namely,the shift design problem, aiming at an alignment of a minimum number of shiftsin order to meet required numbers of employees (which typically vary for differenttime periods) in such a way that over- and understang is minimized. Weprovide an ASP encoding of the shift design problem, which, to the best of ourknowledge, has not been addressed by ASP yet.