Significance Viscous fingering commonly takes place during injection of one fluid that displaces a resident fluid in a porous medium. Fingering normally is promoted where the injected fluid is less viscous than the resident fluid being displaced. We propose a design of a porous medium in the form of an ordered structure to suppress or trigger (depending on the application) viscous fingering in porous media without modifying fluid properties or wettability. We utilize pore-scale direct numerical simulations, state-of-art experiments and analysis to derive predictive tools to evaluate effects of various parameters on controlling viscous fingering in porous media. Moreover, we propose generalized analytical solutions and a phase diagram for the parameter space affecting viscous fingering patterns.