Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines

Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines

 

Frniture

We present an interactive furniture layout system that assists users by suggesting furniture arrangements that are based on interior de-sign guidelines. Our system incorporates the layout guidelines as terms in a density function and generates layout suggestions by rapidly sampling the density function using a hardware-accelerated. Monte Carlo sampler. Our results demonstrate that the suggestion generation functionality measurably increases the quality of furni- ture arrangements produced by participants with no prior training in interior design

Introduction

You are moving into a new home and need to arrange the living room furniture. You have a sofa, armchairs, coffee table, end tables, ottomans,  and a media center.   What arrangement will create the
most comfortable and visually pleasing setting for your home?
Furniture placement is challenging because it requires jointly opti mizing a variety of functional and visual criteria.  Skilled interior designers follow numerous high-level guidelines in producing fur-
niture layouts [Lyons 2008; Ward 1999].  In a living room for example, the furniture should support comfortable conversation, align with prominent features of the space,  and collectively form a vi-
sually balanced composition.  In practice these guidelines are often imprecise and sometimes contradictory. Experienced designers learn  to  balance  the  tradeoffs  between  the  guidelines  through  an iterative trial-and-error process.

Yet  most  people  responsible  for  furnishing  a  new  home  have  no training in interior design.  They may not be aware of interior design guidelines and they are unlikely to have the tacit knowledge
and  experience  required  to  optimally  balance  the  tradeoffs.   Instead such amateur designers rely on intuitive rules such as pushing large furniture items against the walls.  These intuitive rules often
script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js">

lead  to  functionally  ineffective  and  visually  imbalanced  arrangements [Lyons 2008].  The resulting furniture layouts “simply don’t look or feel right,” and even worse the amateur designer “can’t pin-point what the problems are” [Ward 1999].

In  this  paper,  we  identify  a  set  of  interior  design  guidelines  for furniture layout and develop an interactive system based on these guidelines.  In our system, the user begins by specifying the shape
of a room and the set of furniture that must be arranged within it. The  user  then  interactively  moves  furniture  pieces.   In  response, the system suggests a small set of furniture layouts that follow the interior design guidelines.  The user can interactively select a suggestion and move any piece of furniture to modify the layout. Thus, the user and computer work together to iteratively evolve the design(Figure 1).

Our  approach  represents  the  furniture  layout  guidelines  as  terms in  a  density  function  and  treats  manual  placement  of  pieces  as subspace constraints.   Since the resulting function is highly multimodal, we employ a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler to suggest optimized layouts.  To deal with the substantial computational requirements of stochastic sampling, we use graphics hardware to
enable interactive performance.

script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js">

In  summary,  our  work  makes  two  main  contributions.   First,  we identify  and  operationalize  a  set  of  design  guidelines  for  furniture layout.   Second,  we develop an interactive system for creat-
ing furniture arrangements based on these guidelines.  Our results demonstrate that the suggestion generation functionality of our system measurably increases the quality of furniture arrangements produced by users with no prior training in interior design.