I’m looking for an old office cartoon that poked fun at design-by-committee. It depicted the design and implementation of a playground swing set. Its panels depicted increasingly ridiculous and useless renditions of a child’s plank-bench swing suspended from a tree, with titles like “What the board voted for”, “What Supplies Dept requisitioned”, “What the Laborers Assembled”, etc…
The swing set appeared in one panel with its chains attached to limbs on OPPOSITE sides of the tree trunk, which was shown with a space sawed through it to let the swing pass through, and crutches on the branches to hold up the upper portion of the tree; in another, there were three chains (left, middle, and right) attached to the swing seat; one panel showed a vertically oriented seat with the chains attached to the trunk instead of going overhead to a tree limb; and so on.
The final panel, titled “What the Children Wanted”, showed a tire swing tied to the tree limb.
I need this cartoon for my office wall, of course. Any leads would be appreciated.
After returning nothing useful with various searches on swing, swingset, tire, committee, planning, etc., Google finally surrendered its hoarded knowledge when I entered “what the customer wanted” (in quotes):
Y’know, I’ve seen a few different versions of this cartoon; some of them had more panels than the six from the site that tomndebb found. The additional panels were more of the same, like “As management approved it” and “As purchasing bought it” and “As customer support fixed it”
Another place you can find that graphic, along with several variations (which I recently mentioned in a [post=12527322]recent post on this issue[/post]) is here: http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/3
Pretty much every version of this cartoon I’ve seen lately has been fucked up by tech-industry people who think the world began sometime in the 1980s. The cartoon was old when I first saw it in the late '70s, and it said nothing about “project managers” or programmers. Every caption was logically related to the picture above it, and named a department typically found in a government bureaucracy. The first drawing, of a swing with three seats in a vertical row, was labeled with a department (that I can’t remember) that would be expected to demand additional capacity and equal access – urban development, maybe. The next drawing, with three ropes, was about a department covering its ass with excessive safety features – probably lawyers. The rest of the drawings lampooned other features of the bureaucratic mind, and the cartoon ended with “what was really wanted.”
