While explored in the context of creativeness in computer aided design, emergence has hardly ever been mentioned as a phenomenon that may enhance optimization process in engineering design. This paper presents the original approach to constrained 3D component layout design problem that takes advantage of visual shape grammar computations, emergent phenomena and computational intelligence methods. Possible design solutions are generated with a use of a simple shape grammar. Design specific knowledge is represented in a form of goals and constraints and the search process is driven by an intelligent derivation controller. The presented framework is very general but in the same time flexible and easily adjustable to a specific problem domain.