Thanks to this quirky genius you can now tweet with your nose

Dominic Wilcox's invented a stained-glass driverless car, a device for tweeting with your nose and other weirdly wonderful things. This British conceptual designer might be mad, but you can't help falling for his absurd logic, writes Lin Simpson

I really wanted to say something sharp and a bit cruel about Dominic Wilcox, because, well, designers, you know, can rub one up the wrong way, they are so pleased with themselves - and these days everyone calls him or herself a designer.

And he's so steeped in English passivity that I did feel like kicking him once or twice. But he was also adorable. What do you think of Cape Town? "A bit different from London, innit?" I guess recognition is hard for him, because he comes into this reality from a slightly different angle and he really doesn't like talking about himself. "It's all going on in my head," he says.

Wilcox believes not enough people think. "We're all rushing along at a screaming pace, pulling up websites, seeking celebrity, talking nonsense about what we've done, marketing ourselves and networking that we don't stop to think."

Does he call himself an inventor? "Depends who I am talking to. I do come from an art background," he says with typical under-statement. In fact, his education is impressive: Royal College of Art, Design Products (MA), Edinburgh College of Art, Visual Communication (BA).

His work is deeply clever. Not "look at me" clever, or cunning clever, but behind his multicoloured eyes there seemed to be small bursts of fire, a Catherine wheel of sparks.

Many of his designs may be absurd, but they are also wonderfully logical.

"Sometimes," he says, "I use my touch phone in the bath. I know it's stupid. When I put my left hand in the water without thinking, it gets wet and unusable for touchscreen navigation, so I used my nose - also not satisfactory. I then came up with this idea of a nose extension, a 'finger' that attaches to the nose. I did send a tweet saying 'hullo I am tweeting with my nose' but due to auto-correct it came out as 'hello I am meeting with my nose'."

He has also designed and had manufactured a pair of beautiful shoes with a built-in GPS which will take the wearer to any destination, no matter where he or she is in the world.

"Northamptonshire is famous for shoemaking, so I decided to make a pair of shoes there that can navigate you anywhere. Remember how Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz could click her shoes together to go home?" After uploading your required destination to the shoes via custom-made mapping software and a USB cable, the GPS, which is embedded in the heel, is activated by a heel click."

Although his aesthetic might sound a bit impractical, after looking at his bug-like driverless car with stained-glass windows like a small chapel, one thinks, well, why not? So many cars have darkened windows, why not colour them up?

But most wonderful are his sketches - look at his book Variations on Normal (Square Peg) - , all practical and possible, a tear-off tablecloth that works on a roller, like a kitchen towel, and is positioned under the table; a sick bag attached to a false beard for a man being sick on a bus; a wig with built-in camera and mic as memory backup. Some are useful inventions, like the sliding handles on a stepladder and a dual-use coffin/desk.

Wilcox uses technology but says he is not a techno person and likes sketching his ideas. "The thing about sketching is that you can doodle or think a thought and it can make you think of something else and if you make a mistake you can rub it out." 

Here are some reasons I loved meeting Dominic Wilcox:

• He is possibly mad.

• He doesn't care what people think about him.

• He is a conceptual designer (a category yet to be properly defined).

• He is good-looking but seems unaware of it.

• He is polite and humble.

• He does hard-to-do jobs with little pay, all with passion, some just for the love of the concept.

• He has beautiful hands.

• He went to technical colleges (a better education than most universities).

• He is not wearing one trendy, labelled item of clothing.

• He did not mention the word Africa once. In fact, he appeared not to know he was in it.

• He lives in unfashionable (at least at the time of writing, London changes in seconds) Hackney.  

But most of all I loved him because it is people like Wilcox who underpin the whole of the British art and technological world - boys from working-class backgrounds with brilliant and slightly mad ideas. Not in a hundred years, would they think of discussing their advancement prospects or holiday benefits with a boss, or sting you into a coma with personal publicity.

Dominic Wilcox was one of the speakers at the 2015 Design Indaba Conference in Cape Town.