This paper is a review of the progress and perspective of an approach for morphology controlled synthesis of particles by tuning chemical diffusion and reaction. Rational synthesis of materials with designed structures is a long term dream of scientists and engineers. The challenges of this dream lie in the poor understanding on the formation mechanism of diverse structures and the insufficient ability to program structure evolutions. From a view of chemical engineering, a shape-controlled synthesis of particles by regulating chemical diffusion and reaction was developed, which was experimentally confirmed by synthesizing diverse morphologies of silver particles at different diffusion and reaction and synthesizing similar dendritic structures of various materials at diffusion limitation. Diffusion and reaction determines the chemical distribution in the growth front of particles, which drives the anisotropic growth of particles, forming diverse morphologies. Ongoing study focuses on the dynamic stability of structure evolution, to establish a general model for structure design and rational synthesis by considering both the local environment and the nature of materials under the concept of mesoscience. (C) 2019 The Society of Powder Technology Japan. Published by Elsevier B.V. and The Society of Powder Technology Japan. All rights reserved.