Inventor Dominic Wilcox can solve your problem

Breakfast cereal isn’t the most exciting thing on the planet. That’s doubly true if you’re having cornflakes. If you don’t have much waiting for you on the kitchen table, you may be far less inclined to crawl out from underneath your duvet and launch into an aesthetic morning routine. Do you ever crave a start to your day that’s just…different?

Have you ever been standing in the crowd at a gig and had the only 7 foot tall person in the room parked right in front of you? You can hear the music alright but gazing into someone’s sweaty t-shirt for an hour isn’t exactly what you paid 20 quid for.

Exploring an unfamiliar area can make you lost in an instant. Yes you can pull out maps on your phone but what if you need your hands and the battery is nearly dead? We don’t blame you for wanting a more convenient and hands free way to get your bearings. If only all you had to do was look down…

If you’ve encountered any of these problems, Dominic Wilcox has the solutions. Dominic works between the worlds of art, design, craft and technology, and picked up the moniker Chief Inventor when he founded Little Inventors, an organisation that brings children's ideas to life.

He has been commissioned by the likes of BMW and McVitie’s, spoken at the UN, and penned his own book Variations on Normal in 2014. The surprising inventions contained between the pages (ever seen a dual-use coffin/workdesk or a toothbrush maraca?) are typical of Dominic’s style. They’re wacky and wonderful, fusing art with comical problems and a dry perspective. His unique outlook on people and things has led to a fantastic exploration of the tools that can be invented to iron out our little niggles in life.

Mornings made epic. Instead of pouring cereal into your bowl the old fashioned way, use this milk-powered hydraulic crane device worn on your head. The arms are powered by syringes containing milk that act in a similar way to hydraulics on industrial-sized diggers. Push and pull the plungers to move the arms from box to bowl. Finally, press down a plunger to squirt in the milk and complete your breakfast.

Commissioned by Kellogg’s to make mornings more exciting for families, Dominic made a prototype of the device from cardboard before a plastic version was created from laser cut pieces.

It doesn’t take long to get the hang of the controls and then you’re off, making piles of cereal large and small and playing construction worker to your heart’s content. The device might add a few extra minutes to breakfast time but boy, is it worth it. Using a Cereal Serving Crane Head Device in the morning is guaranteed to spice up office small talk and make all other forms of consuming cereal inferior.

There are times in life when being 30.5cm taller would come in handy. It was during a gig that inspiration struck Dominic, “I turned to see a small woman dancing away but unable to see the band. Could I design a way for people to see over obstacles such as tall people like me?” This desire to help other people spawned One Foot Taller Periscope Glasses. That’s precisely how invention happens - the necessity to help yourself or someone else with a problem.

The piece was made from one sheet of mirrored acrylic bent precisely. The glasses were shown at the Extraordinary Solutions to Everyday Problems exhibit at D&AD Festival in London in 2019, before making their way to The Wellcome Collection in 2022 for display in the In Plain Sight exhibition. For now, they are all Dominic's to pop on at home and check what’s on top of the wardrobe or perhaps peek over his neighbour’s fence.

Dominic has accomplished the majestic achievement of inventing the world’s first fully functional pair of GPS shoes. The design combines the best of traditional craftsmanship with the convenience of modern technology in the form of embedded GPS in the heel and mini LED lights that mimic brogue toe perforations.

“I was commissioned by the Global Footprint project in Northamptonshire to create some shoes," Dominic said. "I decided to make a pair that can navigate you to anywhere you wish to travel to. I thought about the Wizard of Oz and how Dorothy could click her shoes together to go home. In developing these shoes, I tried different methods of communicating the direction of travel to the wearer, including vibration, though they just tickled my feet uncomfortably. The simplest and most effective method was to add a circle of mini LED lights that the wearer can just glance down at.”

A USB cable connects the shoes to a computer. You can select your destination using custom mapping software. The GPS within the heel is activated with a nifty click. The LEDs on the left shoe point in the desired direction and on the right shoe act as a progress bar. The two communicate with each other wirelessly to guide the user to wherever they wish to go. It feels even more special if you chant throughout the journey, ‘there’s no place like home’. Or the pub. Or Brian’s house.

Take your pick, which solution quells that problem that’s been on your mind lately? If coincidentally all three of them apply, please send us a picture of you wearing all of the devices at once.