The Design Museum Holon in Israel--whose Ron Arad designed building we covered here--has opened its inaugural exhibition, The State of Things: Design and the 21st Century, which collects 100 contemporary designs and runs through May 15.

According to Aric Chen, one of the show's curators (and Fast Company contributor), designers are responding to a world that's "vacillating between extremes": super structures vs. DIY, hyper-tech vs. handmade, luxury vs. budget. Accordingly, the show's divided into eight categories, which represent trends on the current design scene, such as "Mutant Remix" and "Social Anxiety." First, up, a sneak at "Mutant Remix"....

Richard Hutten reinterprets Oriental rugs by stretching their patterns into striated lines--an effect borrowed from Photoshop, thus uniting the traditional and the contemporary.

A design by Madrid-born designer Jaime Hayon (whom we've covered here), for Lladro, a porcelain figurine company. The pieces are whimsical and weird, mixing space-age pop design and contemporary culture--which stands in stark contrast to stuffiness of Lladro brand. (Imagine Zaha Hadid designing for Cole-Haan.) Hayon calls the genre-mixing a "positive cross-contamination."

Partners Marie Rahm and Monica Rahm took the basic silhouette of Danish cookware and modified them to be arranged as a collection of creatures, adding spidery legs and cuddly handles.

Maarten Baas is better known for charred cabinets and play-doh inspired chairs, but for the Wiek Cabinet, he melded Sixties pop styling with the elementary, blocky geometry of a Flintstones cartoon.

Czech designer Maxim Velcovsky's Catastrophe Vase is the essence of high-low: Meant to be an ironic addition to any genteel breakfast table, it's made of caked earth--studded with what resembles stray bits of garbage.

Now, it's time for some Social Anxiety!

Husband-and-wife duo Raw Edges created the Evacuation Skirt's as a response to Hurricane Katrina: The skirt can be deflated with one hand; when inflated it operates as a kayak that can hold the weight of a full-grown woman.

Despite its gloomily-titled "Global Warming" collection, the Mexican design collective NEL say they're trying to encourage hope in a world fraught with doomsaying. This rug features a solitary ice floe...

...Which features a solitary polar bear. He may be trapped, but gosh darn he's cute.

Designed to "intensify the contact between grandparents and children," the Grand rocking chair by Jelte van Geest exemplifies paranoia about connecting across the generation gap.