God Design is a series of design projects exploring the possibilities of creating new gods and deities with design thinking and absurd thinking.

Human beings create gods or gods create human beings, that is a romantic question. Growing up in a society where I could be exposed to both polytheism and monotheism, I was thinking, while new gadgets and tools were invented and upgraded to enhance people’s lives, gods haven't been updated for a rather long time. To explore the possibility of creating new gods who could specifically address problems and issues in human's daily life in a contemporary context, I use the term “god design” which means utilizing design thinking in creating new gods, everything in this project begins with this concept.

The basic layer of god design is to “design” new gods that work in a modern way, they use familiar objects that we usually see in our everyday life to impose their power just like the traditional gods use their weapons, however, the scenario they use the objects is not as usual. To showcase the gods and communicate with the audience, a booth-like interactive installation and a website are developed as “god search engine”, where the audience could input their daily life concern and being returned with a certain god that relates to their input in the form of a card. The installation took the concept of small size “pop-up” shrines that usually can be found in Japan and India, it will be finished in a hi-tech product aesthetic, and the website will be visually simple and playful.

This project is not aiming at creating a new religion, it is more about looking at everyday life from another angle, focusing on the small daily problems and concerns, delivered in a more absurd and playful way, but still, with its whimsical nature, I hope it could bring positive attitudes and a delightful experience to the audience.

During my research, I found many new deities have been added to Hinduism based on new requirements by people these years, for example, the Chilkur Balaji Temple in southern India is a very popular temple for people to pray for their visa getting approved, engineers and students often visit the temple to pray for a better result for the American working visa lottery. Different conditions generate different needs, in this context, when there is this need, there is this belief being created, and there is a god to fulfill the belief. Some people might point out this as a superstition, but it is somewhere to go when you have nowhere to go, it gives you the hope and energy where technology and other modern tools couldn’t.

I started to think about how I can create the new gods, to find some references, I looked back on how gods’/deities’ images and stories in various cultures, I think by studying how traditional gods were created, I can understand why certain gods/deities could be popular and be accepted by people, and apply those experience into creating the new gods. I researched about gods/deities in Greek, Roman and Nordic mythology, Japanese Yaoyoruzu no kami(8 million gods), Hinduism and Chinese traditional deities, they are all very fascinating stories. Also, by looking at those gods’ story, we can also see the layers of the society and people’s needs. I found that creating a god is similar in designing products, or design in general, so I name this project “god design”.

I developed a framework gradually in designing those gods.

Most of them should address specific problems, they have limited power focusing on one field, they are more like professionals.

Then, just like the traditional gods have their weapons, all those gods use familiar objects from everyday life to impose their power, but they use in a different way. (traditional gods use familiar objects from life as well, as in agricultural society, many gods have the trident as weapon, such as Poseidon and Shiva, I think this design connects people and built a empathy).  

They mainly deal with modern problems which the conventional gods might not be good at.

Their visual styles should be simple, playful and consistent, comparing to conventional god figures to be sophisticated, orthodox and various.

Below are some examples of the gods that I created, all of them are based on certain concerns or problems in people’s lives. I also post them on instagram, you can go to the account be clicking on the images.

I think it is always great to have something physical, so I put them on cards, so that people could touch, collect and take them home.

People’s needs construct the gods, people’s problems are bound to be solved by those gods. To communicate with audience, I would like to build an experience where audience input the concern and being returned with a god which relate to the input concern.

I came up with the idea of a god search engine website and a physical god search machine.

Demonstration video of the website:

The website is rendered as a typical search service website to be intuitive and familiar, when the certain god return to the audience, it comes with the description of how this god works and a machine learning generated excerpt as what this god has to say to the audience, and it is generated based on the input text. I used Analects of Confucius as the source text to train the machine learning model because Confucianism has huge influence on the entire east Asian culture and its literature format is very suitable to be used in this case, also, it is interesting to see how modern problems could be answered by classic philosophy, which is also how classic philosophy should be applied in this contemporary context.

I could not continue working on the physical version due to covid-19, but the video shows what it would look like and work like if it was built, I will have different iterations in the future.

Demonstration video of the physical installation:

The physical version is basically the similar function as the website, but you can get a physical god card with more interactions and it is a room experience. It took reference on mini pop-up shrines in Japan and India and some concepts of a fortune telling stock, I wanted to combine the vibe of traditional worship and fortune telling with the high tech product aesthetic, not only on the object but also for the whole experience.  

I collected people’s feeling about this project, I think they best describe what I wanted to achieve, “a moment of joy”, “oddly warm” and “close to heart”.

I consider this project as a living project, I will continue designing the gods, and I will be a professional god designer. I might write more about the designing decisions in creating the gods as a section on the website, and a gallery page to show all the gods that I’ve been working on, and improve the accuracy of machine learning generated texts.

This is my ITP thesis final presentation keynote video with my voice over, concepts and process are explained here.