There comes a time in a man’s life when he realizes that he cannot create a bespoke configurator for every possible scenario. What about lower scale problems? What about a configurator for a bedroom? Or for a utility room? These are rooms without a TAM in which to create valuable automation in, mostly because interns and cheap labor will do this work readily and easily. (My read at least)
What might a bathroom configurator look like? Well we have a good example lying around. The TestFit Office Generator has a mid-range ADA compliant bathroom generator. It is my number one most valuable to invest in, which is where we started.
Here we have the user adding more assembly and fixed seating space to a floor plate (conceptually). Here we see the math pushing the bathrooms to grow in size, as well as the exit capacity of the stair to grow in width. This is a bespoke, IBC inspired core generator that takes floor loads and generates the compliant minimum bathroom. It is not a generic room configurator, but it does give hints about how one might build a generic configurator.
For this post I will talk about using a single linear array to solve for what should be hosted on a wall for a kitchen. This concept is infinitely expandable into all other room types, because of the generic nature of it. Essentially you, as a designer, would hard-code your design intent into dozens of homemade named lookup tables, and since that lookup table is a one-dimensional array, it will be computed and placed instantaneously and will full control to the designer.
The objects placed might have a minimum number, like a kitchen always requiring a heating element, cooling element, and a water element. Then once those are satisfied, the kitchen requires storage.
Single Kitchen Array Lookup Table Data could look like this:
Years ago I would have actually drawn every frame of this kitchen array and animated it to see if what was in my head makes sense. I know this makes sense. Look at the code-driven bathroom. What if the kitchen array is driven by population of the household. Something like 12″ of additional casework per additional bedroom would be a good scaling heuristic.
Next up, perhaps a generic array with more than one dimension. Like an L shaped kitchen or a living room with a couch wall and across from that a TV wall.