Fabrication-aware Design for Furniture with Planar Pieces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computational design tool that simplifies the creation of flat-pack furniture by guiding users through parameterized component selection, connection specification, and automatic fabrication planning, resulting in ready-to-assemble furniture models.

Contribution

It presents a novel system that enables casual users to design and fabricate manufacturable flat-pack furniture with minimal expertise, integrating domain knowledge into an automated workflow.

Findings

Successfully designed and fabricated various flat-pack furniture pieces.

Automated generation of 3D models and fabrication drawings.

Validated usability through real-world assembly of designed furniture.

Abstract

We propose a computational design tool to enable casual end-users to easily design, fabricate, and assemble flat-pack furniture with guaranteed manufacturability. Using our system, users select parameterized components from a library and constrain their dimensions. Then they abstractly specify connections among components to define the furniture. Once fabrication specifications (e.g. materials) designated, the mechanical implementation of the furniture is automatically handled by leveraging encoded domain expertise. Afterwards, the system outputs 3D models for visualization and mechanical drawings for fabrication. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by designing, fabricating, and assembling a variety of flat-pack (scaled) furniture on demand.