(Here is article in PDF latex version)

Furniture have been along for a long time. Mankind revolves a lot about tools (e.g. clothes). These needs to be stored, enhanced, protected, by furniture.

From a broad perspective, furniture has seen several revolutions.

  • Revolutions in material used with the wide spreading of metal and plastic.
  • Revolutions in scale, with mass-producing
  • Revolution in purpose, for at least in France, the number of common furniture in a house went in one millennia from simple chest to hundreds of drawer, desk, sofa, etc.

Like in many other fields, it seems that digital tools (computer aided design, digital fabrication) is also impacting furniture.

This leads to seriously exciting research. Indeed, one of the issue with digital world is that it only lives inside computers. Digital design/fabrication is a great way to materialize all these abstract stuff (software, physic, and math).

Guided design may be useful in several ways, Mainly to improve functionality of objects :

  • Tailored object
  • More robust objects (mechanical analysis)
  • Better assembled objects (joints / partitioning)
  • More complex objects
  • Optimized object (for strength, weight, etc.)

and to help/improve the aesthetic aspect

  • help transfer style
  • help add details (pattern)
  • play with shadow/reflection/physics

Some papers

Here are some papers I liked:

  • State of the Art in Methods and Representations for Fabrication-Aware Design:
  • https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~funk/star17.pdf
  • A state of the art! So useful

  • Computational Interlocking Furniture Assembly:
  • locking mechanism
  • Very interesting, at last no more screws.

  • Elasticity modulus of cabinet furniture joints:
  • This one is interesting but lack the analysis of traditional joinery

  • Interactive Design and Stability Analysis of Decorative Joinery for Furniture
  • joinery
  • Work on joinery with a very computer graphics approach, nice results.