I wanted to de-clutter my workspace this morning, so I started cleaning my desktop. To my delight, I found this screenshot:
A couple of months ago, I was reading Tim Gunn’s responses on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything.” I first learned about Tim Gunn from watching Project Runway, a reality television series that features aspiring fashion designers who compete with one another on a variety of challenges that test their skill and creativity. Gunn serves as the show’s co-host and, more importantly and interestingly, as a mentor to the designers. Week to week, up until Project Runway was picked up by the Lifetime Channel, I looked forward to watching Tim Gunn wander around the workroom of the designers. He would walk around and attentively study each designer’s work in progress while offering some suggestions and guidance. Gunn would habitually close his remarks with encouraging words: “make it work” or “carry on.”
Gunn’s walk around the Project Runway workroom is an oddly manufactured situation. Here I mean that his counseling of contestants in the workroom belongs to a genre of entertainment where interests are grounded in the growth of a brand. Reality competition shows can be a bit disheartening to watch. Under the guise of promoting young talent, the corporations behind reality shows make bank without having to respond to the individuals vulnerably exposed in the workroom with their unfinished works. It’s a game of attrition, we’re told. That game’s logic manifests in various ways, but most prominently in the belief that those who lose are weak and incompetent. It takes on another scary, dangerous form when contestants rationalize their exploitation: “I’m not here to make friends.”
Enter Tim Gunn, whose lovely phrase “make it work” came out of another oddly manufactured situation: the classroom. Within the particular situation of designers in a workroom, or students in a classroom, “make it work” signifies a practice. This practice can’t be reduced to a simple game of winners and losers. Because its objectives are not about a ranking or a grade, the practice of “making it work” is really about exercising problem-solving, resourcefulness, and experimentation. Intentional or not–it’s hard to tell these days because writing often occurs in moments of haste–Gunn’s response on “Ask Me Anything” offers a model for how we can implement a “make it work” ethos in situations of learnings. Notice how, as he explains the meaning of the phrase, Gunn moves from the distinction between “I said” to “you’re” towards a “we.” He elaborates that the phrase is meant to provoke thinking through challenges rather than assigning blame or incompetency on the part of the student. The problem isn’t the student, so Gunn’s advice takes on a supportive but impersonal tone:
“Offer up a diagnosis for what’s going wrong, and a prescription for how to make it right.”
Even though overt displays of branding and commercialization infiltrated the designers’ workroom on Project Runway, and though “make it work” has been appropriated in ways to promote the show, “making it work” remains a practice that is tailored to the concerns and particular interests of individuals in the process of learning.
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Even good teachers are teased by students, of course. Here’s one of my favorite scenes from an early season of Project Runway:
Also, here’s Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Tim Gunn from earlier this year.
