The History of Furniture Construction
Introduction to Engineering Design of Furniture
4.1General Information
Each year, at furniture fairs that take place periodically, furniture factories present their latest models based on modern technology, construction and an attractive aesthetic and functional form. In many manufacturing companies from a few to over a dozen, prototypes or new designs appear during the year. In order to shorten the time as much as possible from the idea, to the preliminary draft to the model, and then testing technology and production, to placing the product on the market (Fig. 4.1), it is necessary to integrate computer-aided systems: of designing, manufacturing and management into one comprehensive system dedicated to the dynamic modelling of manufacturing processes (Smardzewski 2007). By reducing the time of preparing a new product, we extend the sales period and maximise the profit. In the process of developing a new product, in order to significantly reduce the costs of the project, IT support is needed to make furniture design and construction easier and simpler.
In technical literature, as well as in practice of furniture manufacturers, designing and construction are clearly distinguished, although in many circles these concepts are treated as synonymous. There are also many definitions of designing and construction provided by various authors. Tytyk (2006) after B^binski (1972), Gasparski (1978), Kotarbinski (1990), Krick (1971), Nadler (1988) and Tarnowski (1997) provides various meanings of the term designing, which he defines as follows:
• a manufacturing process, in which the ownership of the item, with the appropriate use of available methods and tools in certain conditions aim to include in the product of designing a model of the designed object of characteristics corresponding to the requirements specified in the design task (B^binski 1972),
• the adjustment of the way in which any system operates (Dietrych 1974),
• conceptual preparation of the relevant change (Gasparski 1978),
• the most important work of practical sciences (Kotarbinski 1990),
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 185
J. Smardzewski, Furniture Design,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-19533-9_4
Product introduction Costing
Production project Technological project Project to prototyping Project to modeling Preliminary project
• subsequent actions, starting with the identification of the problem, and ending at developing a satisfactory solution in terms of function, economy, etc., (Krick 1971),
• the creation of a system adequate to meet a certain need or fulfil a certain function (Nadler 1988) and
• a system of actions meeting needs, which aim to clearly define the product’s construction and use based on the identified project task.
Taking into consideration these definitions, Jablonski (2006) writes that the process of designing a product in the technical aspect consists in clearly determining such construction and usage requirements, which will guarantee the fulfilment of specific needs of the object by shaping the relevant characteristics.
Meanwhile, construction is defined as follows:
• choosing construction features which are the logical basis for identifying the construction (Dietrych 1974);
• part of the technical design process, the immediate goal of which is to detail the form of component parts of the designed object and the value of construction features (Tarnowski 1997).
Therefore, designing and constructing furniture consists in shaping the requirements of the anthropotechnical system, the integration of which during the shaping of the product’s form and its component parts, will meet the projected or created needs of the user.
