Tree Swing Cartoon Parodies

About

The Tree Swing Cartoon Parodies, usually called as “What the customer really needed” (Japanese: 顧客が本当に必要だったもの), are a series of photo collages based on a cartoon explaining how projects really work by tree swings. It has become one of the template images to caricature failure in product managements since the middle of 2000s.

Origin

The source of this fad is a cartoon explaining perception gaps in software developing projects by 10 pattern of tree swings. It was posted to the web circa 2003.^[1] And its Japanese translated version, titled as “This is how IT projects really work”, was first posted to Dashi Blog on February 22nd, 2004.^[2]

On the Japanese web, this cartoon is usually dubbed as “What the customer really needed” which is a caption of the last cell.

This cartoon had been often cited in blog posts around 2004-2006. In a reflection of its popularity on the web, a web site dedicated to this cartoon, THEPROJECTCARTOON.com, was launched in the middle of 2006.^[3] This web site provides translated versions of this cartoon in 15 languages and its updated versions added new cells.

Precursor

Tree swing picture, also called as tyre/tire picture, has been sometimes used for explaining or caricaturing discrepancies in managements since 1970s. The oldest instance known in today is an illustration posted to University of London Computer Center Newsletter in March, 1973 (shown below, left). In the academic world, this picture became to be known by being cited in the book The Oregon Experiment^[4] published in 1975 (shown below, right). It was written by Christopher Alexander^[5], an architect known as the founder of “Pattern Language”.

A web site businessballs.com has been searching the origin, and listing variations of Tree Swing Pictures found on old textbooks.^[6]

Spread

Along with the increase of this cartoon’s recognizability by several blog posts, it became to a sort of template for parodies or photo collages in the Japanese web pages or image board sites like Futaba Channel (2chan), which caricature various kind of product managements. A gallery page for those parody photo collages was uploaded on July of 2008.^[7] As of 2012, it has about 130 images. Besides, an article for this cartoon was submitted to niconico Pedia on September of 2010.^[8]

Examples

Most of parody photos are made by just swapping images to editor’s favorites. Meanings of Japanese captions in each cell are the same to the original.