Assisted direct manipulation interfaces have been widely studied in computer graphics, dating back to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketch- Pad [Sutherland 1963]. In the context of architectural design, Harada et al. [1995] describe an interface for creating floorplans. Their interface supports local constraints and invokes discrete lo- cal search whenever the user drives the layout into a challeng- ing configuration. Likewise, Michalek and Papalambros [2002] use sequential quadratic programming to optimize an arrangement of rectangles in response to interactive manipulation. These ap- proaches assist the layout of general rectangular arrangements and do not incorporate furniture layout guidelines
