Kitchen Design: Graphic Display

Software	Java or C++ or Smalltalk or another object oriented language with good GUI facilities
Covers	GUI interface programming, icon design, HCI
Skills Required	Programming, some interest in graphics, some interest in HCI
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

Designing kitchens is a popular domain for research in artificial intelligence for design. The layout of a kitchen is limited by the size and shape of its floor, and where its doors and windows are. Kitchens are usually assembled from a fixed collection of units of known sizes and shapes, which limit what you can do in the available space. They have to conform to a number of requirements, some coming from the user and some imposed by building codes. The set of requirements that the kitchen should meet can vary, and the requirements differ in importance.

Your challenge: Build a graphic interface to display the design of a kitchen. The kitchen is specified as a floor plan including the locations of doors and windows, and a set of units taken from a unit catalogue (which defines their sizes and shapes) and their locations. Your task includes defining a syntax for describing the shape of the kitchen and for describing the size and shape of units and their locations. Remember to worry about doors and the spaces they can swing through.

The easy way: Display the floor plan (at floor level, worktop level, and at wall unit level), with labelled elements for each type of unit. Ideally these elements should be icons that show immediately what the unit is.

The hard way: Construct three dimensional models of all the units, and create wire frame projections of what the kitchen will look like from different angles.

Extensions

Develop a graphic interface for a subsystem to design the units to be included in the kitchen design.

Variants

Develop a graphic interface for a layout design task other than a kitchen. A good one would be office layout design.

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