My wife and I did this when we were renovating a kitchen. We laid out counters, cabinets and appliances using boxes to get a sense of how much space we'd have walking through the modified layout, and how both sight-lines and light-lines would work with cabinets hung on the walls.
It worked very very well, and the final layout achieved the exact "feel" we'd decided on when iterating over our potential layouts.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's be all that much help. Each space is unique, with different challenges and requirements so I recommend you work with what you've got and what you want. In our case, we had a room with multiple entryways, a peninsula that was cutting off the space unnecessarily, and some specific appliance wants. By identifying those problems and design requirements, it helped us come up with the solution that was a huge improvement.
Ya, fair enough. I'm wondering if you found any isolated layout relationships that are working really well that could be applied in most layouts? For example, "we wanted the dishwasher behind the sink instead of beside it for XYZ".
I'll share one relationship that I've found I like... in my last two kitchens, I've had everything coffee/tea related in one section. All the coffee/tea kettle/espresso machines are next to each other. All of the coffee supplies and mugs are in the cupboards directly above them and all of this is either next to the sink for using the faucet wand to refill the Keurig or Espresso machine, or next to the fridge to split the water line and divert one water line into the Keurig machine (direct water line doesn't seem to be as big a need for the espresso machine since I'm the only person who uses that one).
One of the problems I'm struggling with though is that I'm thinking about doing two dishwashers in my next kitchen. It sounds straightforward enough, although I'm having trouble thinking through how to design it so it won't be confusing during those times when you only have enough dish volume for one dishwasher, yet still make it convenient for those times when you do need two dishwashers. Maybe there's also a desire to cycle the two dishwashers so one of them doesn't wear out much faster than the other.
I worked at McDonald's in high school and they've clearly revised the restaurants a lot since then, but they still have this mindset. I forget what they call it now, but the middle of any walkway is essentially a "fast lane" and nobody is allowed to stand there.
It's one of those things that seems obvious once you hear it, but few people do it elsewhere. I wish everywhere operated like this... malls, airports, etc. If everyone who is stopped just moved to the sides then everyone in the middle could go so much faster.
They built a to-scale model, robbed that vault, recording the whole thing, then played it back for the security room while they broke into the real one.
This type of analysis is common in Industrial and Systems Engineering and it has to do with time and motion study. The idea is that by analyzing the human and work process you can find efficiencies in the system and thus improve output. This was popularized in the industrial revolution with Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. In fact a famous movie was created about the Gilbreth's called Cheaper By the Dozen which talks about how they used their Business Management consulting with raising their large family.
One real-world example of this comes from the SF-based Long Now Foundation. When they turned their (rarely-visited) museum space into a (now-popular) cafe and bar, they invited a bunch of people by to build a cardboard prototype and try it out:
In philosophy, you sometimes hear an idea along the lines of "the least useful (or useless) map is that which has a 1:1 scale. This is a nice counterexample.
One step up from this, courtroom construction projects sometimes have a full scale courtroom mockup including temporary furniture out of plywood or foam. There's a lot of important sightlines between different desks/seats at different heights and then it's all custom built out of nice wood, so mistakes are expensive.
That's probably done more in VR by now, I did some work in college at Penn State's Computer Integrated Construction Research Lab with 3D mockups (including their law school building which was why this came up). Back then it was on a 3x rear projected stereo screen so a whole room of people could put on glasses and see it, but with VR headsets being so affordable now (compared to that setup at least) you could just do that design meeting over the internet.
It worked very very well, and the final layout achieved the exact "feel" we'd decided on when iterating over our potential layouts.