André Brocatus was here...

Even the 2012 cartoon mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, have the notion of surveillance built into their design. Wenlock and Mandeville are two slightly different-shaped silver blobs, meant to be drops of steel taken “from the last huge girder of the Olympic Stadium.” Each of their faces is taken up entirely by a single eye, which is meant to be a camera lens. The packaging for the plush-toy versions of both figures explains, “My single eye is like a camera letting me record everything I see.” (locog has also licensed toy versions of London bobbies and Buckingham Palace guards with camera lenses for faces.) Is the idea of giving children a surveillance toy, I asked Johnson, just a little creepy?

“Are you referring to Mandeville and Wenlock?” the mayor replied. “The thing that children up and down the country, indeed across the planet, are crying out to their parents to buy them for Christmas? Are you referring to our national icons as creepy? I think that’s—they will be, if they are not already, as cherished and as sought-after as—uh … Schtroumpfs. Or Smurfs. They are the Schtroumpfs du jour. They will be infinitely collectible. What to you is a creepy, monocular, Cyclopean android-type thing is to many children a lovable, hilarious, uh, individual—that will comfort them at night.”

“And watch them,” I said.

“And watch them,” he answered. “And look after them.”

In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine - admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad)…I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.

The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.

And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.