Strike as Prayer

Each strike releases barley seeds into the land. Sowing becomes prayer.

Notes 備考

Seed Dispersal Object

Industrial Design · 2026

Optional Studio IV

Originating from the wooden fish in Tibetan Buddhist ritual, this prototype reimagines the seed vessel as an embodied act of devotion.

Sound becomes a gesture of hope: for harvest, for rain, for continuity. Highland barley is the staple food of the Tibetan Plateau, and it is sacred. The muyu, a wooden fish struck in prayer, carries the same faith. Here, the two become one act.

Form

The object takes the shape of a highland landform, the place the seed comes from. Inside the mountain stands a seed-shaped resonator, struck with a mallet that ends in an ear of barley.

Section through the object: a seed-shaped resonator standing in a mountain-shaped container, crossed by the mallet, against a plateau landscape. — Section

Axonometric of the mallet, seed resonator and mountain seed container, set among the altitude zones of the plateau. — Mallet, Seed Resonator and Mountain Seed Container, among the plateau’s altitude zones

How it works

1. The Seed Resonator
2. The mountain, lifted from the seeds
3. Each strike releases seeds

The ritual year

Before sowing, people walk the barley-growing highlands. They strike the seed-shaped wooden fish, and its sound travels across the plateau like wind through the valleys.

Strike to pray for harvest
Strike to sowing
Strike for favorable weather
Strike to celebrate the harvest

Circular plan of the object at the center of a year of barley growth, from seed selection to harvest, with the four moments it is struck. — Plan: a year of barley, from seed selection to harvest

A hand strikes the object with the mallet outdoors; barley seeds have fallen onto the white stone beneath its stand.

With each strike, seeds fall and return to the soil of the highlands.

It is an act of cultivation, and an act of devotion.