If you think your iPod is a piece of art, you're not alone.

The curators of a new design exhibit think it's pretty nifty, too, along with redesigned prescription pill bottles, a computer game meant to ease the pain of children suffering from severe burns, and ... Google.

"Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006, " on view at the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York through July 29, is a showcase of the best design work from the past three years in everything from architecture to fashion to book covers.

And the show includes something from Hawai'i — a transparent, foldable kayak made of a high-tech polymer by Hono-lulu company Clear Blue Hawai'i.

Ellen Lupton, one of the show's four curators, said she wanted visitors to understand that design touches everyone.

"Design is part of your life," she said. "It's the sheets on your bed, it's the furniture you sit on, it's the car you drive."

And by becoming more educated about it, and better able to tell good design from bad, people can make more informed choices about the design in their lives, she said.

The show covers all three floors of the museum's Upper East Side location, and each room mixes a range of media, from clothing to magazine covers to robotics.

The pieces do reflect certain concepts, though, Lupton said: that a lot of design in the past few years has focused on mimicking the natural world; that design has been about creating community; that there is a movement to make design personal and available to everyone.

"Design has this very social function," Lupton said.

That's one of the reasons the iPod is part of the show. Over the past three years, with all its various iterations, it has created a community of users as well as revolutionized how we listen to music and watch video.

And Google is "one of the most important designers of our time," Lupton said. She pointed out the tools the company has created, from a search engine to its mapping program.

The items in the show range from material we might see every day — clothing from designer Narciso Rodriguez or redesigned prescription pill bottles from Target (the main sponsor of the show) — to highly specialized objects such as a robotic lobster that trawls the sea floor to a computer game for burn victims that tries to distract them from their pain by having them throw snowballs at a number of creatures.

"We're here trying to show edges of the field," Lupton said, "the best, the most interesting, a real range of what's happening in design today."