Hasta La Ideas

As this writer hails from Chicago, which is currently in the midst of an Olympic bid, we hope they’re paying attention right now with the planning for the 2012 Olympics in London, learning from the successes and mistakes they’ve had along the way. This week, we’re hoping for an education in the latter, as the London organizers currently have some egg on their collective faces, though whether they understand that or not is a bit confusing. Design Week reports that the organization received so many applications to work in various areas of design for the specific Commission for Sustainable London 2012, they decided to just go with luck and give jobs to the firms they’d randomly selected (though, to be fair, there were a few bits of criteria that had to be met for those names that went into the hat). Was this story uncovered due to some accidentally discovery? Or by some particularly keen investigative journalist? No. Instead, it was in the e-mail the organizers sent out to the firms and freelancers who didn’t land the job:

An e-mail sent by Olympics tender organisation Compete For to consultancies that had missed out on the tender says, ‘We had an overwhelming response from 245 organisations.’

‘Due to the number of high-scoring responses we have shortlisted a number of suppliers randomly from those who scored the highest mark in the questionnaire. This was done anonymously.’

Understandably, the designers and firms who weren’t hired are a little upset. After all, while honesty is nice, would it have killed them to at least pretended to look at their work first? Also, probably not the best piece of news for people to be reading the same week the committee has launched a competition for young people, ages 16 to 21, to design a logo for their official education logo. “Sorry kids, we were pretty busy, so we just picked one of your logos at random. Hope you understand. Bye!” is how we imagine the truly horrible e-mail would read.

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