The first activity of Sirio, INPS's design system, was not designing a component, a layout or a guideline. It was writing a manifesto. In an institution with no consolidated user experience culture, and no common language between the people handling design, development, communication and service governance, starting by "doing" would have been faster and far more gratifying. We chose instead to take a step back, and to build the project's cultural foundations first.
The process: a vision I did not write
As the person responsible for the initiative, I did not write the vision on my own. I limited myself to defining the strategic objectives — what problem we were solving, under what constraints, with what desired impact — and handing them to the group as non-negotiable context. That frame kept the co-design from degenerating into generic brainstorming; within it, the vision emerged from a collective process.
The group was cross-cutting: front-line stakeholders who dealt daily with services and touchpoints, coming from different departments, many carrying (more or less painful) memories of failed attempts at interface unification. Alongside them, external experts in UX and design systems. In practice, the Institute's first informal design council. The work unfolded in structured workshops inspired by design thinking, working not only on the vision's content but on its form, its language, the values underneath it.
The most recurrent difficulty? Helping people step out of the operational perspective, strongly oriented to compliance, and move up to the plane of values and purposes. When asked to contribute to the vision, many tended to propose tools or concrete design choices instead. But precisely this continuous exercise of lifting one's gaze and abstracting from the everyday proved precious: it sharpened the vision and, at the same time, made the participants more aware of the broader meaning of their own work. This was no stylistic exercise: we were building the cultural base of a transformative project. And there was an engagement strategy at play too: the people involved in drafting the manifesto were the same ones who would later give Sirio its shape. The manifesto worked as an initial pact — the vision was never endured, it was shared from day one.
Vision, mission, eight values
The vision that came out of it is a single sentence:
Design digital services that improve the quality of citizens' lives.
Simple, but carrying a radical reversal inside: digital innovation is not measured in technical or regulatory terms, but in value as perceived by the citizen. In a public administration historically oriented to compliance, that is a complete repositioning of the guiding criterion. The mission translates it into practice: give the citizen all and only the information and services they need, through a digital presence that is simple, accessible and constantly optimized. Every design choice can be held up against that sentence: usability becomes a systemic obligation rather than decoration, and the work of reduction and elimination of the superfluous gains legitimacy.
The eight values made the vision actionable — each one a cultural safeguard against a specific drift:
1. Users at the centre. The citizen turned from "formal user" into the constant reference of every choice: the antidote to compliance-driven inertia.
2. Collaboration and diversity. Involving people is not enough: you have to build with people who are different and complementary.
3. Value of reuse. The antidote to uncontrolled proliferation, coherent with the very logic of a design system.
4. Value of sharing. Transparency and reuse, to break the culture of silence between silos.
5. Coherence and standardization. The technical and cultural foundation of common rules.
6. Measuring impact for citizens. Accountability oriented to value, not to output.
7. Continuous improvement. Iteration written into the DNA: innovation is never "finished".
8. Search for objective evidence. Deciding on data protects the project from the arbitrariness of personal opinions.
The test: was it a good vision?
A vision is judged on precise traits, and this one held up on all of them. Clear: direct language, zero jargon, no interpretation needed. Simple but powerful: a formulation you can remember, quote, repeat — and one that shifts the centre of gravity from procedures to the value generated. Ambitious but realistic: positioned just beyond the operational horizon, a desirable yet reachable scenario, stimulating without frustrating. Anchored to a concrete need: the fragmentation of INPS services was a well-known problem; the vision was not written in a vacuum. Engaging: those who built it felt part of it — and its constant appeal to the ultimate meaning of the work acted as a powerful motivational force. Durable: since it was written, it has never needed rewriting; it crossed project phases, contexts and changes of leadership, and in critical moments it proved useful precisely because it was stable. At some point it was no longer something to be remembered: it was something people believed in. And, for those still working on it, something they believe in today.
The communication move
For a vision to work, writing it is not enough: it has to be told, repeated, made alive in everyday behaviour. In Sirio's case the storytelling was constant — in workshops, in documents, in meetings with executives — and it was brought back at every hard decision: if the goal is to improve the citizen's experience, then some choices are not negotiable.
But the move I remember with the most satisfaction was a public one. The UX@INPS manifesto was shared on the institution's official social channels as the project's first public contribution, and it was the first piece of content published on the repository that would later host the design system. Before components, technical documentation or guidelines existed, we decided to share the vision. That, after all, is what a manifesto is for: declaring why you do what you do. The direction was precise: meaning first, structure later.
These choices gave the project narrative legitimacy. An initiative that tells its own story coherently finds allies more easily, receives fewer specious objections, withstands external pressure better. And above all:
A well-told vision generates a credit that can be spent in difficult moments.
It was the true story of the project, built while we were building it. That is why it worked.
In short
Building the manifesto took time, energy, listening and patience, at a stage when it would have been easier to "start doing". But that initial time turned an operational group into a team with a mission, and an abstract idea into a project with a recognized, recognizable identity. In all the phases that followed — from the first prototypes to today's widespread adoption, through the construction of a design function from scratch — it was the vision, and the story that accompanied it, that kept Sirio on course. The compass — the first of the three tools of the innovator — worked.