Chances are, you will die a horrible and incendiary death – if, that is, you believe the message of the latest exhibition at the Modern. The good news is that, whether earthquakes, terrorist attacks, or microbes do you in, at least you can go in style now that several dozen designers, here and abroad, have pooled their talents to prettify and adorn our woefully imperfect world.

“SAFE: Design Takes on Risk” is not an especially effective show, for the simple reason that it lacks focus (oh, and a point).What you are left with is a high-concept show in which – and this is typical of recent design exhibitions – the concept itself has slipped out the back door. All that remains is a grab bag of objects that are tangentially related to the theme of fear.

Some displays, it is true, represent the genuine confluence of utility and design, like Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s paper-log huts, which were recently deployed in Turkey after an earthquake. But not every item on view is an example of design, except in the broadest and most useless sense of the term. Many are simply utilitarian objects whose form is dictated by their function: the transparent garbage bags that can be seen in the streets of Paris, cigarette cartons with health warnings from the Canadian government, those brown sleeves that engird your paper coffee cup.

Other objects are pure design and, despite their creator’s claims to the contrary, have little or no function: inhabitable pods that hang from trees, inflatable houses, metallic poles bristling with surveillance cameras. The best things on view – ineffably sweet stuffed “animals” in the shape of deadly bacteria – don’t even pretend to have a function. If you expand the concepts of fear and safety with as much elasticity as this show does, you can readily see how all architecture was born of fear, born as an answer to the adversity of the elements, or to the threat of invasion or attack. All built structures fortify the physical inadequacies of the people who make them, just as all implements – forks, bowls, clubs – compensate for the weaknesses, the inabilities, the insufficiencies of the human condition.

But even in the face of so wide a choice of perceived menace, most designers in this show are unable to shed the irony that is a constant feature of the present cultural moment. What other point can be attributed to the stainless steel and polycarbonate shark suit on display, or the banana bunker (that protects the fruit until you eat it),or the bulletproof quilted duvet?

We also encounter the usual left leaning mentality so dear to the worlds of art and design. A fine example is “Suited for Subversion,” Ralph Borland’s bright-red nylon-reinforced padded jacket, equipped with a speaker and a pulse-reader, that is intended to protect those who fancy engaging in a bit of “anti-capitalist civil-disobedience.” That the suit would immobilize anyone who wore it – not to mention making the person resemble a crustacean – appears not to have occurred to its creator.

“SAFE” is pleasant enough to walk through, given the drollery – intentional and otherwise – of the objects on display. But its real value is in capturing, as effectively as those atomic fallout drills did at the height of the Cold War, the prevailing mood of the moment. Here in New York, we have just survived a widely publicized terror alert on our subways, while visions of baby carriages packed with hazmat dominated the headlines. Our nation has been flooded by gulf waters and buffeted by hurricanes stronger than almost any in living memory, and now Paula Zahn wishes you to know that there is a very good likelihood that 150 million Americans may or may not die from the avian flu.

Not being a coward, I find it hard to understand or even sympathize with most of these fears. Whether or not they are un-American, they are surely unworthy of a true New Yorker.

October 16 until January 2 (11 W. 53rd Street, 212-708-9400).