A brain-tickling, hands-on exhibit dubbed "D.Day," opening Wednesday at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, explores these expanding boundaries, inviting the visitor to do the same.

This is a five-senses experience and none is neglected, not even the nose.

Exhibit A: a patented technology developed by Exhalia, a French company specializing in "scent communication and marketing," brings smells into the realm of telecommunications. Imagine, for example, the faint odor of lilacs wafting through the air while watching a film set in the rolling hills of Provence.

Another display dissects and diagrams the almost-painfully elaborate, scientific calculations and experimentation behind the culinary genius of Spanish chef Ferran Adria along an entire wall.

The objective, asserts designer and collaborator Luki Huber, "is to obtain a maximum of magic with a minimum of objects," and ultimately "to savor not just with the palate but with one's intellect," which she calls the sixth sense.

Another section of D.Day is devoted to what might be called designing with a conscience, and highlights innovations designed to alleviate human suffering and to reduce the gap between rich and poor.

What looks at first glance like a giant, silver satellite dish, for example, turns out to be a solar stove, with the shiny surface capturing energy from the sun and channeling the heat toward the cooking surface in the center.

In Africa, "the CooKit solar stove helps fight against deforestation," explains D.Day's curator Valerie Guillaume as she demonstrates its use.

Designed by Roger Bernard and Barbara Kerr, the highly portable and inexpensive stove has already proved its mettle in refugee camps across Africa, including in Kenya and Ethiopia.

A continent away in India, Dr. Sugarata Mitra at the National Institute of Technology and Information in Mubai has designed and installed three self-sufficient computer "learning kiosks" in dirt-poor villages as an experiment in "minimally invasive education."

The results, according to a multi-media presentation, are nothing short of astounding and could become the cornerstone for promoting computer literacy in the world's most impoverished corners and narrowing the digital divide.

"Children are able to pass a formal computer science exam without ever having been taught the subject" after experimenting and working at the kiosks, which look like ATM machines protected by a three-sided shack.

The D.Day exhibit is rounded out by two other sections, one leaning heavily towards visual and conceptual art, the other toward industrial design at it purest.

An installation of painted plastic dolls, for example, is accompanied by recorded interviews with four "Sex and the City generation" women talking about relationships in an age when DNA profiling - based a strand of hair - tells us more than we may want to know.

Is the day when prospective parents will flip through a catalog of DNA characteristics, ranging from musical talent to eye color, really that far off?

Finally, companies like car maker Peugeot and cell phone giant Motorola offer up their most cutting edge designs, both companies drawing from the Italian touch offered by legendary body designer Pininfarina Extra.

It is here that one notices a huddle of teenagers with their noses pressed against the glass of the ground floor exhibit with that "I want one" look in their eyes.

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