Abstract In the context of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, the introduction of collaborative workplaces, where humans and robots work together, represents a growing trend to improve the productivity, adaptability, and flexibility of production plants. Indeed, human–robot collaboration (HRC) is a very deepened topic in the scientific community and the designing of collaborative workplaces is a challenging issue due to the high level of complexity and multidisciplinary of its features. This work tackles the complexity of collaborative workplaces and proposes a structured framework to support strategic decisions in designing. A multi-level designing framework is proposed as a supporting tool for designers. Within five domains of collaborative robotics, the elements of a collaborative workplace are identified and proposed in a framework in order to better consider human safety and working conditions during the designing process. A decomposition matrix and an adjacency matrix are used to develop a multi-level designing workflow. Finally, an interactive tool is presented, named “Smart Graph Interface” (SGI), to read and exploit the contents of the framework. The SGI is applied to three case studies from the literature, to spread out principal outcomes in terms of applicability and robustness.