Reading Papanek and what's-his-name's Nomadic Furniture I'm astonished by how much they've optimized to minimize the difficulty of cutting their furniture designs out of plywood sheets with hand tools, rulers, and T-squares. (Many of the designs use other materials as well.) If you're using laser-cutting or another automated sheet-cutting process like CNC plasma cutting or Maslow-style CNC routing, measuring is free; only the material and cut length, and sometimes the cut curvature and angles, add cost.
And, cutting prototypes out of cardboard with a box cutter, I find that indeed measuring takes an enormous amount of time, as does precision in cutting. An imprecise cut can be made in cardboard by hand in a fraction of a second, while a precise cut may require a minute. This totally kneecaps the otherwise amazing advantages of cardboard. (See Cardboard furniture.)
So we should expect nomadic-furniture designs optimized for digital fabrication to look very different from those designed for 1970s manual construction. Maybe they would use a great deal more material, but cheaper material (though the original Nomadic Furniture or maybe its sequel were early champions of Frank Gehry's laminated-corrugated-cardboard furniture) or in thinner sheets. Maybe they would look like the fully-interlocking designs Mark Pauly's group at EPFL have been publishing at SIGGRAPH over the last few years.
Presumably, though, you'd like to use some kind of mathematical optimization algorithm to search for the lowest-cost design that fulfills some kind of requirements. The cost of fabrication might be one part of the objective, while others might include weight, maximum load, impact energy to withstand, rigidity, and fabrication time.