Four mock-ups and the evolution of a table design
Functional design: You can begin to investigate form and function with a couple of cardboard boxes and a particleboard top.

The fact is that everyone can design, and everyone does design. The process of designing is the process of solving a problem. In the case of building furniture, there are four aspects to resolve: functional design, spatial design, structural design and detail design. Building a full-size mock-up provides you the opportunity to envision, test and evaluate various possible solutions.

To build a mock-up, use the least expensive, most readily available materials and join the parts in the simplest way you know. Common methods include screws, hot-melt or cyanoacrylate glue and staples or small brads.

The rules are simple: make the parts dimensionally accurate with reasonably smooth surfaces, plug the screw holes, and paint the whole thing white. A mock-up like this will give you the best possible view of the relationship between the form and the space. Equally important, it’s easy to see where dimensions need adjustment and shapes need to be changed. The mock-up makes the transition from what you thought might be a well-proportioned piece to knowing that the real thing will be well-proportioned.

Functional and Spatial Design

The broad idea of function has two aspects: the place of the furniture in the room (that is, its context) and how it performs its job. Context is important. Whom is the furniture for? Where is it going to go? Context helps you make a piece tailored to your needs or to the problem you are trying to solve.

Oddly enough, we rarely get to deal with new functional furniture design problems. While you might discover something new, for example, about the functional aspect of small tables, it’s not likely: People have been making them for the last 500 years, and the parameters are rather well understood.

Consider the example of an end table intended to sit alongside an overstuffed sofa in a living room. Its job is to hold drinking glasses, TV remotes and books. The context has physical limits: The sofa is huge, and there’s no surplus of space around it. It’s likely that the corners of a square tabletop will stick out too far, a suspicion that can be confirmed in a couple of minutes by cutting some cardboard  into square, octagonal and round tops. The context also will determine the size of the top, and the best way to gauge this is to make a mock-up and take a look. You’ll probably find that what looks right in the workshop is too big in the house. The full-size mock-up also allows you to evaluate other elements of your original design to determine whether they are in character in the setting.