8 Goofy Design Ideas That Solve Problems You Didn’t Know You Had
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In Variations On Normal Dominic Wilcox has come up with a book full of clever designs, like this hair cutting level. 
Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
For the past decade, the British designer has been scribbling ideas into notebooks for things that should exist but don’t. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
A two-way toothpaste tube would solve all your marital problems, surely. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
And this snoring solution headphone set wouldn't hurt either. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
Need a place to stash that illicit tuna fish sandwich during your wait at the DMV? Behold the Queue Shoulder Hook Table. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
We need this: A name GPS that reminds you of people's names. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
A way to literally be on the fence. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox 
Save some trees and install this fence, which detects the position of a person and follows him with its five planks. Dominic Wilcox
Dominic Wilcox SIMILAR GALLERIES
Some years back, Dominic Wilcox was tasked with cutting his then-girlfriend’s bangs. Though he had no professional hair cutting experience, he wielded scissors and gave them a chop. “I preferred them wonky, but she was traditionally a very straight-fringe kind of girl,” he recalls. What he really could’ve used was a pair of scissors with a built-in spirit level to ensure an exacting, straight line.
Such a device doesn’t exist in the real world (not yet, anyway), but it does in the pages of Wilcox’s new book, Variations On Normal. The book is filled with sketches of similar contraptions, all sprung from Wilcox’s puckish, fertile imagination. For the past decade, the British designer has been scribbling down ideas for things that should exist but don’t.
These variations on normal, as he calls them, are sometimes perfectly logical. Who wouldn’t use a two-sided toothpaste tube that allows you to squeeze from both ends? Sometimes they’re totally fanciful: A lock that can be opened only by tickling it; a GPS headset that reminds you of people’s names at a party. “Although they’re all sort of absurd ideas, they’re always built with one foot in reality.” he says. “They’re all solving a problem that maybe we didn’t realize we had.”
The Serious Point: Observing Our Tiniest Behaviors
Wilcox is a keen observer of human behavior. Though the book is full of imagined objects, his sketches are more about people than things. Finding inspiration, then, is mostly a matter of looking.
Dominic Wilcox
“I tricked myself into thinking that in everything around me there were hundreds of ideas waiting to be found,” he says. “It’s like having a third eye switched on.”
You can see the commentary in sketches like the dual-purpose coffin desk, which is mostly an observation of humans’ habit of working themselves ragged. Or the personal space accessory, a circular contraption that hangs off your body, creating a wide radius to shield you from personal bubble-popping intruders.
Since he started the project, Wilcox has turned some of his fantastical sketches into real-life prototypes. There’s a bed shaped in the human fetal position, a toothbrush with a maraca, a teacup with a fan to prevent burnt tongues.
But for Wilcox the point isn’t to create things that might actually be made so much as to consider how whimsy and imagination might benefit the logical, rigorously efficient world we live in. “If it could exist in the world, then it’s failed as a sketch…it’s slightly too close to reality.” he says. “I think it’s very important thing to embrace the ridiculousness, not be afraid of it. Some of the best ideas originate from crazy ideas.”
You can buy a copy of Variations On Normal at Wilcox’s website.