Designable Religion is a a Critical History Studies dissertation written in the context of my postgraduate studies. The essay explores the different types of theories and mechanisms that attempt to explain religion and uses them as frameworks for developing technologies capable of offering personalised meaning. Ultimately, it attempts to set a starting point for a design-engineered meaning-making process .

Research questions.

What can be learned about how religions create and offer meaning? How and why brands are using religions mechanisms? Are there formulas for constructing meaning? Can those formulas be expressed in computer language, and therefore, is meaning computable? Can religions be personalised from data?

INTRODUCTION

Departing from the premise that religion needs to be redesigned in response to a global crisis of lack of meaning, this document focuses on the question how. For this reason,It explores how the principles that govern the religious rationale function, with four primary objectives: First, to observe how religion has evolved into a design discipline that offers commoditised products and services. Second, to make a case for the possibility of religions of one, opposed to the conventional conception of religion as a collective phenomenon. Third, to translate the religious rationale into design mechanisms that apply to art and design in general, and can potentially aid in the design of meaning and personalised forms of religion. Fourth, to reveal the disruptive effect that fostering the relationship between religion and digital technologies will have.

My interest in religion began by paying attention to the influence that artefacts like amulets, relics and representations of deities that were ‘universally understood to be important sources of supernatural power’, can have on behaviour and emotions. Analysing them made me aware of the close relationship that often goes unnoticed between design, technology and religion. In the intersection between this three universes, there are vast and unknown varieties of phenomena defining how abstract concepts translate into the palpable attributes of these objects and how they cause intense emotions in return. Inventive religious technologies behind these effects have existed for thousands of years, and have practically gone unnoticed.

Another reason for my focus on religion is based on the fact that it has remained untransformed by the digital technologies that the Internet enables. Unlike almost every other major human construct including money, manufacturing or transportation, the fundamentals of religion remain virtually unchanged by algorithms, artificial intelligence and even social media. This work addresses how some of the functionalities and capacities found in these technologies might shape religious practice in the future. The way people understand the world and their place in it undeniably affects their perception of well-being. Religions typically have a dominant influence in the way individuals build explanations to support themselves during important life events such as adversity or personal milestones. Religions provide a practical finite and exclusive repertoire of elements such as rituals, temples, amulets or prayers, that are fixed to an inherited set of ideas about the world. That being the case, it can be contended that some of these elements, can be more timely or effective at generating a sense of happiness, well-being, fulfillment or meaning depending on who you are and how you see the world.

To that end, this work seeks to question why should these elements be religion exclusive. If a given set of, for example, rituals that are impossible to know for non-initiated or non-practitioners, are useful or meaningful to someone not belongingto the religious creed who officially performs them, it seems like an awful waste of knowledge to keep them deliberately practice-bounded or hidden in secrecy. My work assumes that the moral and cultural implications of deliberately promoting syncretismcan be solved because religions will continue to be normalised by the same forces that have been slowly merging cultures for thousands of years, and have recently been accelerated by globalisation.

At the beginning of my research, I had an intuition that fashion brands experimenting with the possibilities of custom-made production were currently being successful in transforming their customer’s emotional needs into products capable of changing their behaviour. Powered by automatised fabrication processes and e-commerce interfaces that provide intuitive design tools, customers can effortlessly modify pre-defined combinations of pre-designed products. Apparently, a general assumption in this industry is that value can be built through personalisation or the possibility of ‘crafting objects accurately to match any particular demand’.

However, I became a sceptic about how much can superficially modified products help people move from a commercial sense of perceived value, e.g. this was a good purchase, to finding their emotional, and even existential needs fulfilled. As a reference, collectors experience intense emotional feelings for items that seem common or worthless for other people. Apparently, the influence over behaviour I observed in religious artefacts, is built over time through the relationship between objects, users and meaning; and it does not necessarily come from the artefact itself. The possibility of designing and constructing meaning will be an underlying question this work will attempt to address.

Because of our intensive use of the Internet, contextual information about everything we do is now widely available and even publicly accessible. Many of our actions are ceaselessly turned into data, stored and analysed by the services we use so that they can be transformed into insights they can exploit. Companies like Amazon can predict the books you will want, and therefore potentially buy from them, based on other books they know you have browsed, purchased or read. Google offers advertisers the possibility to show their products and services, to users who have performed queries of relatable concepts in their Internet search engine. Inferring technologies like these are predominantly being used as commercial oracles specialised in fueling consumerism across industries. In Chapter one, I will address how companies are using the quest for meaning as a business driver and speculate about the effects of refocusing this efforts to benefit the user. Are we upon the possibility of uncovering revolutionary existential insights about individuals?

The research methodology I decided to adopt is based on two references. First, the exhaustive comparative work performed by Dubberly, analysing dozens of design processes, looking for patterns in how different industries and designers approach their practice. Second, by the relationship between Star Wars and The Mono-myth, a framework devised by Campbell ‘describing the stages heroes consistently go through in classical myths’. It could be argued that Star Wars’ success and impact on popular culture was articulated by the use of the Monomyth as a design framework. I am inferring that by analysing numerous theories attempting to explain religious phenomena, it is likely that unknown patterns and design mechanisms, similar to the Star Wars-Monomyth, will emerge.

Chapter two will be dedicated to expanding this idea by establishing criteria for analysing religious theories from the perspective of design, and for extracting potential design mechanisms that may lie within them. In Chapter three, I will focus on dissecting the general structure of the design process, looking for hints in its structure indicating how religious principles can function as design principles that leverage digital technologies to generate meaningful outcomes. Chapter four will be dedicated to speculating about what this outcome could be, and how it could work like. Before continuing, I have three disclaimers to make. First, that even though this essay is elaborated from the agnostic point of view of a designer. It is inspired by my admiration to religions’ contributions to humanity through the history of civilisation. Second, that I am aware that personalised religions may not be an all-in-one solution capable of solving the global crisis of meaning; I do hope, however, that they may someday be helpful for a vast amount of individuals. Third, that I am deliberately letting go of my impulse to think about religion as an out of bounds topic, reserved for the theologically enlightened.