The domain is secondary to our agenda: our main goal is not to build a learning system for furniture design. Rather, flat-pack furniture design provides a test case for system development to investigate design critiquing. It is an interesting domain where students encounter many structural and spatial design issues as they make stable furniture out of flat materials. For this reason, furniture making is often used as an early exercise for first-year design and architecture students. Compared to many other design domains, such as architectural design, the problem space of flat- pack furniture design is relatively small, so we need not account for the enormous body of domain.
