Toward Structure-Optimizing Dimensions in Furniture Design

Dimension serves as a core element in furniture design, profoundly affecting furniture comfort, aesthetics and safety. With the continuous advancement of emerging technologies such as intelligence and digitalization, furniture design demands further dimensional optimization and design technology improvement from the perspectives of spatial environment, consumers and designers. This review first briefly introduces the influencing factors of furniture dimension design, and then summarizes the decision-making basis for furniture dimension design from humanistic, mathematical, technological and interdisciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the research progress on the correlation between furniture dimensional optimization and four research domains, including sustainable development, parametric design, user orientation, and socio-cultural adaptability. The correlations between topological symmetry, perceptual symmetry, mirror symmetry and dimensional matching of furniture were also analyzed. It is indicated that existing relevant studies still have certain limitations and lack the integration of state-of-the-art technologies. Accordingly, five prospective research directions are proposed for the symmetry, design, generation, feedback and optimization of furniture dimensions, by incorporating multi-objective optimization, intelligent generation, user-adaptive control, neuroergonomics, large language models and reinforcement learning technologies. The proposed directions are expected to improve the efficiency, symmetry, accuracy, personalization and adaptability of furniture dimension design.