Inventor's extraordinary solutions to day to day problems

“I would say that what I do is sort of in between art and design – it’s difficult to put your finger on it,” he explains. “I don’t fit into any particular system or type of job. I’m self-employed, I do my own thing, and I’ve sort of created my own niche in life, which is doing what I want to do. It’s looking at the world – how we are as people, how we act, what we do – then coming up with ideas that are sometimes humorous, sometimes a bit provocative, but always, hopefully, with a smile.”

Dominic is commissioned by companies, including BMW, MINI, Paul Smith and Kellogg’s (hence the robotic spoon) to respond to design challenges. His inventions are then displayed in exhibitions, including the latest one for Microsoft. “It’s mostly companies or organisations which set me a challenge in a particular area that they’re interested in,” he says. “I like being challenged. The most recent one I’ve done is Microsoft Surface. They challenged me to come up with some extraordinary solutions to everyday problems. I came up with a couple of ideas and then designed them and they were presented at an exhibition in London.”

The designs to which he alludes were for One Foot Taller periscope glasses and a Directing Jacket (a jacket with light-up green arrows) for avoiding awkward pavement encounters. The former, he explains, was inspired by his experience at a gig. “I got the idea when I was at a music gig and I was standing at the back,” says Sunderland-born Dominic. “I’m 6ft 2ins so I could see the band, but then I looked behind and there was this very small woman who was dancing away to the music, but clearly couldn’t see the band at all. I was looking for problems and that’s a little problem that I noticed, and I just thought, can I design something to solve that problem?”

You might wonder how all this started – was he dreaming up inventions while still at school? Well, not exactly. “I think I was quite normal as a child,” reflects Dominic, who’s based in London. “I used to make model aeroplanes and hang them from my ceiling. I got quite good grades in mathematics and physics at GCSE, but I guess my main interests were painting things and drawing things. My dad thought I should get a job at Nissan but I said, ‘No, Dad, I want to go to art college,’ and he was very supportive of that.”

Dominic enrolled on an art and design foundation course at Sunderland University, where he was inspired by one of his tutors. “That’s where I found my passion for creativity and thinking up ideas,” he says. “There was a teacher called Charlie Holmes and he really set me on the path with the challenges he set me.”

A visual communications degree at Edinburgh College of Art followed, then an MA in design products at London’s Royal College of Art. “It was quite a famous course,” he says of the latter. “That’s when I moved into more 3D stuff. Then I left and I’ve been really doing my own thing ever since.”

It was a blog he started while living in Germany, called Variations on Normal, that really launched his career. “I would say that I didn’t know where I fitted in because I wasn’t 100 per cent in the art world and I wasn’t in the system of the art gallery world,” Dominic admits. “I wasn’t interested in the design of mass production things, so it took a little bit of time for me to decide, instead of me fitting in with the system, I’ll just show my stuff online, so that’s when I started my blog. Then people started to comment and that gave me confidence, so in many ways the internet helped me.”

On the subject of mass production, or, indeed, production of any kind, Dominic is clear – it’s just not where he’s at. “My area of interest and passion is ideas,” he asserts. “I know people in the past who’ve had an idea and then they’ve gone down the mass production route and spent about five years of their life doing that and thousands of pounds on patents and stuff like that. I think in those five years I could have come up with many other ideas, so I believe my time is best spent thinking up ideas, creating them and showing them.”

And it’s not just his ideas he’s keen to promote. Having set up a kids’ organisation, Little Inventors, he hopes to inspire the next generation of Thinker Uppers. “It started as a project in Sunderland,” Dominic explains. “Cultural Spring put out a call for artists or designers or creative people to come up with ideas that would reach at least 200 people, and I asked 450 primary school children to think up and draw their own invention ideas. I put a call out for local makers or manufacturers to turn them into an exhibition on Fawcett Street. That was about three years ago, and it went viral. We had about 1,000 visitors and I started to get emails from people around the world wanting to do the same thing, so we decided to create a permanent organisation called Little Inventors.”

Now, as well as a website, the collective has its own book, The Little Inventors Handbook – “It’s basically a guide to becoming an ingenious inventor,” laughs Dominic. It’s also gone as far as space. “This year, in Canada, we made it into the International Space Station,” he says. “An astronaut there, David Saint-Jacques, announced the winners of a challenge, which was amazing. A project that started in Sunderland is literally now in the stars.”

Having worked for him so far, Dominic is happy to let the future decide itself. “I’ve never really had a plan,” he admits. “It’s very much like if you do one thing that’s interesting then people will sometimes ask you to do other things that are interesting, so I’m just concentrating on doing good things.”

Dominic’s Stained Glass Driverless Sleeper Car of the Future is currently on show at London’s Science Museum as part of an 18-month free exhibition, Driverless: Who is in Control? Until October 2020.

dominicwilcox.com