One of the best things about being a designer is that I see design expressed everywhere. I doodle service blueprints when I’m on hold with Comcast. I get excited when a favorite app developer makes a clever design fix that adds delight. However, I was not expecting to learn anything about design when I recently went along with a group who was purchasing a private barrel of bourbon from Wild Turkey. What I got was a great portrait of how craft. Master distillers don’t call themselves designers, but they tackle the hurdles, uncertainty, and elements of chance and taste like the best practitioners in the business.

Garbage in, garbage out.

With bourbon — the quality of the ingredients matter. The corn, rye, wheat, and malted barley are meticulously sourced and tested before they are made into mash, which is then distilled and aged to become bourbon. Experts agree that if the mash is bad, the bourbon is going to be bad, no matter what you do to it.

Design projects work the same way. Our mash bill is comprised of good data, research, insights, and goals. I had a project recently where the team was tasked with solving “poverty” in twelve weeks (bad goal), and given two weeks to research the causes of poverty (bad data set). We dumped a lot of random data into our frameworks and spent the remainder of the project trying to rescue, recut, and realign the pieces. Good design projects have far more “aha” moments than “oh, fuck. we need to re-do this” ones. While all good projects have their own challenges, the pieces slowly distil into something better rather than constantly falling apart.

Even with constraints, there’s tremendous variation.

Let’s say you are a master distiller and get the perfect mash into every barrel of bourbon. You’ve use the universal ingredient of Kentucky limestone water, and the required new charred-oak barrels. You still may not get great bourbon.

Despite strict constraints, there’s huge variation — distillate from the same batch stored in barrels made by the same cooper, stored next to each other in a rick house, the barrel warehouse, might still be wildly different.

Design, like bourbon, has tomes of best practices, but using them doesn’t guarantee results. Think about all the designs Steve Jobs and Johnnie Ives produced for Apple. Some years featured great iPhones and uninspired iPods. Great leadership, teams, and vision do not always make great art with every batch. We don’t know how something is really going to turn out until we experience it.

Time and timing does weird (and occasionally miraculous things).

Bourbon aficionados will talk about the importance of where a barrel of bourbon was stored in the rick house. There’s one bourbon producer that believes aging bourbon on lower floors produces the best results, so all of its rick houses are built low. When asked about the validity of this, master distiller Eddie Russell dismissed the theory but admitted he likes to look for good barrels of bourbon on the middle floors of his five-story rick houses. But, in reality, you can’t predict what the bourbon is going to be until you taste it after years of aging.

With design, we do this, too. We like to look back, see what worked, who made it and why it was magic. A lot of times, I think this is superstition, like wearing lucky socks. No batch of bourbon is ever going to turn out a 100% perfect set of barrels, and no designer is going to turn out 100% great ideas. We both work with live ingredients and timing. People’s tastes, the economy, and the world change just like the weather and time that age bourbon. This is why designers need to be okay with failure and know our outcomes aren’t completely under are our control.

We’re all in the relationship business.

Eddie Russell is great at making bourbon. Picking a barrel with Eddie was what I imagine it would be like going to work with him — lots of straightforward knowledge and laid back appreciation of craft. The four-minute ride from the Wild Turkey tasting room to Eddie’s rick house illustrated two different worlds. The tasting room is filled with cleverness (#GiveEmTheBird), great merchandise and Wild Turkey branding. The rick house was soaked with over a hundred years with of bourbon, dirty, and a full Technicolor picture of Wild Turkey craft. While my bourbon connoisseur companions preferred the dirt, they appreciated the tasting room along with the tourists on the Bourbon Trail.

Seeing the brand and culture, product, and history it was a great lesson in how to build UX that was clever, fun and authentic. As a designer, thinking about how we balance preserving the story and the truth while telling it to the audience we happen to have is always a challenge. I loved being in the rick house, but I almost took home a pair of “give ‘em the bird” messaged gloves because they made me laugh. Brands can have dimension. As designers, we are definitely in the relationship business, no matter what type of designer we think we are. We connect people. Shaking hands and building products for lots of audiences is always going to be part of the gig — — just like it is for the master distiller.

The best clients like to be surprised and challenged.

Listening to Eddie talk about barrel buying clients, he articulated that the best customers don’t want something usual and predictable. They want something that is both great and challenges their definition of great Wild Turkey bourbon.

In design, it is easy to deliver a client exactly what they ask for. I tasted bourbon that was predictably great Wild Turkey Bourbon and I’ve delivered clients exactly what they told me they wanted. Everyone was happy, the job was done, but none of us grew our knowledge or found new delight. When I am lucky enough to have clients who allow room for the unexpected — — we all grow together and grow our respective crafts.