In a room where decisions get made, design almost always loses. We've all been there. Not because it's wrong, but because it brings the wrong goods to the table: it delivers artefacts, while the people sitting there are buying consequences. A clearer screen is an opinion, and in an argument about priorities opinions cancel each other out. Whoever brings a number wins.
In the public sector this is even more structural. With no market there is no dissatisfied customer who stops buying, there is no competition, and performance tends to be measured by volume: how many services online, how many cases processed. In that setting improvement can become — far more often than we'd like — entirely optional. The price of a service that works badly is «paid» in a far more indirect and muffled way than in the private sector, and quality tends to stay a matter of personal taste, until someone turns it into an objective figure.
The only «external pressure» you can apply to a public administration is the impact on the people who use its services. But for that impact to work as pressure it needs three properties:
- it must be centred on real needs;
- it must be objectively measurable;
- …and at some point, it must become binding.
The first two, design knows how to produce. The third is everybody's problem.
Design as the discipline of impact
Design starts from the real problem of the person using a service, observes use rather than intentions, measures the effect of choices on users, and turns needs into a design constraint. Put like that it sounds like a textbook definition, but it has a precise operational consequence: it is the only discipline that produces, as a natural by-product of its own method, the raw material leadership needs in order to decide.
Measuring impact does three things at once. It doesn't give power to citizens in the abstract, it gives power to their needs, which is more useful because it turns them into a criterion rather than an aspiration. It applies the external pressure that public administration structurally lacks — the subject of Making Things That Work. And above all it can be understood by the people who decide, which makes it the only language that lets design into a room where resources are allocated.
Out of this comes a cycle I've seen close completely very few times, and one of those, perhaps the most significant, is worth recounting.
How the expectation is born
INPS per i Giovani — "INPS for Young People" — is a pure design project, and it begins with a reversal of strategy. Instead of promoting individual services one by one, we identified an audience held together by shared needs, interests and expectations, and started communicating to that audience: by needs and by life moments, rather than by administrative procedure.
We started from research — surveys, questionnaires, conversations with young people — and a clear picture came out of it. Young people don't know the Institute, don't know which services are available to them, have no idea how the pension system works. And they perceive public administration as distant and uninterested in them.
If the problem is that they don't know, the action isn't to promote: it's to explain. We built messages that would teach something, in the formats and the languages that audience actually uses. Language was the crucial point: we stopped speaking officialese and started using the codes of creators and of the people who reach that audience every day. I've written about that separately, because it deserves its own discussion.
There was a second obstacle, though, and it concerned what came next. The Institute delivers around five hundred services: even assuming you've convinced someone that something concerns them, there remains the problem of helping them find which one. It is one of the hardest things there is, and the analyses have confirmed it for years: it's the point where the navigation of any large public portal fails, because it is usually organised around the structure of the provider rather than around the question of the person searching. And even when — as in our case — it has been built together with users, tested, improved and tested again… well, it remains a serious puzzle for anyone.
Hence the architecture, and this is why the case belongs in a discussion about measurement. The system is multichannel, with different messages and formats depending on the channel, and they all converge on a landing page where each person recognises their own area of interest and is taken from there to the subset of services and information that concerns them. In practice, instead of reorganising — again — the navigation for everybody, a long and uncertain undertaking, we built a side entrance, cut to fit a single audience. Identify, attract attention, deliver to the right thing.
Look at it as a structure and you'll see what makes it unusual, at least for a public administration: it's a funnel, and every step counts itself. How many people a message reached, how many arrived at the landing page, how many recognised their own need, how many landed on a service. And the measurement wasn't bolted on at the end by scraping whatever data happened to exist: it is a property of the shape we chose.
And come they did. Three million visitors. A conversion rate towards services close to twenty per cent. A fifteen per cent year-on-year increase in the share of young people registered.
There is a reason those figures travelled, though, and it isn't their size. The project plugged into a need that wasn't the Institute's alone. Bringing young people closer, informing them, encouraging them and accompanying them towards the world of work touches two questions the country has open in front of it: demographic decline, and the share of young people who never make it into employment. Whoever read those numbers wasn't assessing a successful campaign. They were looking at a partial answer to a problem they already had clearly in mind, and which had been on the table before the project existed.
Measuring impact is necessary, but it isn't enough. The impact has to land on something the people who decide already care about.
An excellent number on a question that costs nobody higher up any sleep stays an excellent number, and goes no further.
It's the same principle I describe in Innovare nella Pubblica Amministrazione when writing about sponsorship: to work out where to invest your energy, and therefore what to propose to the leadership, you first have to work out what the leadership buys. It holds for how you present a project, and it holds even more for how you choose one. Attaching your work to a priority that already exists on the agenda of the people above you — better still, on an agenda broader than your own organisation's — means you don't have to go looking for backing every time, because the sponsor comes from the subject itself. Choosing what to work on is as much a part of the craft as choosing how.
Once that choice is made, the real result stops being the figures. The result is what happened once they started circulating: a wave of internal projects set up the same way, and a change in the Institute's communication strategy. Nobody imposed it. Someone saw impacts aligned with strategic objectives, and started expecting them elsewhere too.
This is the moment the cycle closes on itself. We design things that work, we measure, we communicate the impacts — and out of that comes an expectation of impact: the organization's habit of asking what effect something will have before doing it. Once that habit exists, design stops having to justify itself. It gets sought out, because without it the numbers everyone now expects don't arrive.
But expectation is not obligation
Here we need to be honest, because this is the point where most accounts of this kind cheat.
A case that works creates expectation. It doesn't create obligation. Expectation lives as long as the attention that generated it: a priority shifts, the people change, and you go back to measuring how many things were done instead of how well they worked. Anyone who has spent long enough in a large organization has watched exactly this happen.
For impact measurement to become structural, two things are needed that no single project can produce.
Infrastructure. As long as every team builds its own metrics on its own, every demonstration stays artisanal and, above all, incomparable: two services measured by different criteria can't be lined up, and a number that can't be compared with any other never becomes a criterion for evaluation. What's needed are shared, cross-cutting tools — analytics, instant feedback collection, indicators defined the same way for everyone — made available to anyone who designs, so that measuring is the easiest path rather than an act of goodwill.
Evaluation. The step that makes all of it irreversible is when having measurement tools becomes a duty, and when organizational units are assessed on their performance in terms of the impact they produce, and not only on volumes. That is the direction of travel, and it is the slowest part, because it touches the way an administration judges itself.
What it looks like when it actually happens
It's worth looking at the countries that have reached that third stage, because the comparison says something you wouldn't expect.
In France the State's information system sits, by decree, under the responsibility of the Prime Minister, and digital projects above nine million euros must pass through an opinion the minister cannot ignore: in French administrative law that kind of opinion binds the person deciding. Since 2023, by prime-ministerial circular, the State design system is mandatory for every new public website, and every ministry must appoint a design manager. In Japan the digital agency is headed by law by the Prime Minister and requests, as a single block, the budget for the information systems of every national administration: a bottleneck on money, which is where priorities actually get decided. In the United Kingdom, for a decade, no transactional service could go live without passing an assessment, and departments' digital spending could be blocked from the centre.
None of these countries has an apex design figure. Design counts there because it is attached to a decision: a budget, a gate you have to pass, a requirement without which you don't proceed.
And the most instructive case is the opposite one. In August 2025 the United States established, with considerable fanfare, a Chief Design Officer at the White House, inside a body called the National Design Studio (an excellent name, it must be said). In the text that creates it, that body «advises» agencies, and agencies «shall consult». There is no standard acting as a bar to clear, no power to stop anything, no funds of its own, and the structure expires after three years.
It is the grandest title ever given to design in a government but, at least for now, it looks like an empty box.
Where to start
From all this comes a practical rule, which holds for a country as much as for an organization, or for a single department inside one: the value an organization genuinely places on design is measured by how much design takes part in a decision. Everything else — the number of designers, the quality of the documents, the beauty of the guidelines — describes intentions. And stays decoration.
And since nobody hands you that seat at the table, the only way to take it is to produce impact, in terms of real value for users, that the people deciding can spend. Which requires, first of all, designing things so that they're good for something (worth repeating) and so that they're measurable from the outset: it is the form of obligation that depends on nobody else, because it's the one you impose on yourself.
There is one last obstacle, and it's less technical than it sounds. People who do this job in public administration almost always work away from the spotlight, and often without knowing how many others, elsewhere, are in the same position. We don't know each other, we don't know how many we are, and we don't even know how good we are. As long as every demonstration stays locked inside the organization that produced it, the expectation of impact never extends beyond that organization's walls.
Which is why the last step of the cycle — we communicate the impacts — isn't an exercise in internal communication. It is how an isolated practice becomes a widespread expectation, and a widespread expectation, in the long run, becomes a rule.