October 21, 2017

Dynamic Optimum Furniture Height Diagram

Dynamic Optimum Furniture Height Diagram

I stumbled across an interesting diagram from the 1950s showing the optimal dimension of various furniture items along side a 5'9" tall person.

Wouldn't it be useful to be able to determine the optimum furniture height for people with heights other than 5'9"?

So I went ahead a made a client-side app to dynamically generate the optimal furniture heights based on the proportions of the original drawing.

Project Code on: GitHub | Live Demo

Checkout the the embedded version:

Design & Features

The plan was to create a simple application consist of simple input field and calculated dimensions overlaid on the diagram. However, self-impose feature creep set in. The feature set now includes:

  • Metric & US Customary Unit Modes
  • Automatic User Height Input Unit Conversion
  • Saves User Height between Sessions
  • Print-Friendly CSS & JS Scaling
  • Responsive Design
  • Model-View-Presenter Architecture
  • Inversion of Control Pattern with Dependency Injection
Lessons Learnt

Two notable techniques were used to achieve precision overlay with diagram scaling and enabling print-friendliness. These techniques will be subjects of near-future posts.