In a room where decisions are made, design almost always loses. We've all been there. Not because it's wrong, but because it brings the wrong currency 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 neutralise one another. Whoever brings a number wins.
In the public sector this is even more structural. Without a market, there is no dissatisfied customer who can take their business elsewhere, and there is no competition; 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 cost of a poorly functioning service is felt far more indirectly and less visibly 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-sector organisation 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.
Design knows how to deliver the first two. 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 that way, it sounds like a textbook definition, but it has a precise operational consequence: it is the only discipline that naturally produces, through its methods, the raw material leadership needs to make decisions.
Measuring impact does three things at once. It does not empower citizens in the abstract; it gives weight 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 decision-makers, 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. One of them — perhaps the most significant — is worth examining.
How the expectation is born
INPS per i Giovani — "INPS for Young People" — is a design-led 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 began with research — surveys, questionnaires, conversations with young people — and a clear picture emerged. 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 a lack of awareness, the answer is not promotion but explanation. We built messages that would teach something, in the formats and the languages that audience actually uses. Language was the crucial point: we stopped using bureaucratic language and started using the codes of creators and of the people who speak to 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 identify the relevant one. This is one of the hardest problems to solve, 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 considerable challenge for anyone using it.
This is where the architecture comes in, and it 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 an alternative entry point designed for a specific audience. Identify the audience, capture its attention and guide people to the right service.
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 is inherently measurable. 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 the results followed. 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 gained attention, 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 major challenges facing the country: demographic decline, and the share of young people who struggle to enter the labour market. 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 result on an issue that does not keep senior leaders awake at night remains just an excellent result.
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 matters to the leadership. 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 subject itself provides the case for sponsorship. 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: the Institute's communication strategy changed, and now proceeds by gradually identifying the other strategic audiences, each with its own channels and its own language. Nobody imposed it. Someone saw impacts aligned with strategic objectives, and started expecting them elsewhere too.
This is the moment the cycle is complete. We design things that work, we measure, we communicate the impacts — and out of that comes an expectation of impact: the organisation'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 results everyone has come to expect cannot be produced.
But expectation is not obligation
Here we need to be honest, because this is where most success stories become less than honest.
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 organisation 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 attempt to demonstrate impact remains ad hoc and, above all, incomparable: two services measured against different criteria cannot be meaningfully compared, 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 every design team, so that measuring is the easiest path rather than an act of goodwill.
Evaluation. The step that makes all of it irreversible is when the use of measurement tools becomes mandatory, and when organisational 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 information system is placed by decree under the authority 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 submits a consolidated budget request for the information systems of every national administration: a central point of control over funding, 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 matters in those countries because it is embedded in decision-making: 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 enforceable standard that agencies must meet, no power to stop anything, no funds of its own, and the structure expires after three years.
It is the most prestigious title ever assigned to a design role in 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 organisation, or for a single department inside one: the value an organisation genuinely places on design is measured by how much design is involved in decision-making. 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 decision-makers can act upon. Which requires, first of all, designing things to produce genuine value (worth repeating) and so that they're measurable from the outset: it is the one form of accountability that does not depend on anyone 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 doing the same work. 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 organisation that produced it, the expectation of impact never extends beyond that organisation'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.