Bosses who concentrate on superfluous matters do things that are like "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." A person who does not acknowledge that they have a serious problem is like "a drowning person worried about a hangnail." Both of these expressions invoke unsafe situations to make their points. So what points are to be made in a design show about safety? For one, such a show illustrates the gulf in common understanding between design and "good design." After a visit to "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the general public should hopefully walk away with the idea that design is much more than decoration. This is a good thing for the design profession as a whole and for design practitioners in particular.

After all this is the Museum of Modern Art, not Core77, or ID magazine nor some other organ played by designers to serenade other designers. Part of the purpose of the MoMA is to educate the general public about what design is and what it is for. "Safe" accomplishes this better than most design shows in recent memory - and does so emphatically, and against a cultural and commercial mainstream that often conflates design with decoration. This is useful to bear in mind while walking through the show, reading its explanations and peripheral materials. As the central theme of this exhibition, "Safe" is virtually impossible to turn into an exercise in either aesthetic or academic pretentiousness. "Safety" is simply a juicy design topic.

"Safety" occupies its own level within Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a handy tool (sometimes used in design planning) that attempts to classify human motivation. According to Maslow, safety is a basic need, just above physical needs like food, sleep and warmth; and below more psychological needs like social belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. Maslow's hierarchy also asserts that one cannot begin to address the "higher needs" without first satisfying the "lower" ones. So for Maslow, we cannot begin to think about the decorative level of our furnishings until we have reasonably secured our survival. As Paola Antonelli, the show's curator points out, "Many people remark that safety is a timely topic, but I would say that it is timeless as well." This show was actually conceived before September 11, 2001, shelved in its immediate aftermath, and then renewed and richly modified after a period of time.

The organizing structure of "Safe"is both situational and object oriented. There are over 300 objects that are divided up into sections devoted to shelter, armor, property, everyday, emergency and awareness.

To the predictably hurrumphing annoyance of a few designers I canvassed shortly afterwards, the show makes very little distinction between finished products on the market like Design Continuum's Masterlock redesign, and ironic, fun, conceptual projects such as a pizza box laptop case by Human Beans. But I found this blurring to be intentional, and it works further to bring a non-designer public closer to the ways in which designers think.

This show could have gone down other, more dangerous ethical paths, and wisely didn't - such as dividing up products between those meant for "natural" versus "man-made" disasters. But there are designs here that address various "man-made" dangers. And the mind wonders what to make of them. Does a set of finger rings with pointy edges worn by a woman walking home alone at night become different if those same rings are used by an assailant? As in nuclear science, it is a case of a neutral object being adapted through the intent of its user. There is always a potential to make moral mischief around the impartiality of objects, but it is not worth it. The show easily could have created such mischief itself, but to its credit witholds from doing so by exposing rather than preaching - or rather, by defending rather than attacking.

In short, go to "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" with your clients, your family or anyone who should understand that design addresses itself foremost to human need and not only to individual wants.

Check out 73 images from the show in our photo gallery.

Cordy Swope is a design strategist and co-founder of normal life, a research and product development consulting firm.