Helo bawb! Hi everyone!

We’re counting down the days to the Senedd election here at Transform Wales.

For information about voting, check out Vote.Wales and make sure your vote counts this year.

Election 2026: Are we building a modern state or just digital wallpaper?

With the Senedd election just over a week away, the debate around our public services has reached a critical point. While every party is promising a “modern” Wales, we’ve looked past the slogans to see if their plans actually address the broken machinery of government. In our latest post, we test the major party manifestos against the core recommendations set out in our report, Transforming Public Services for a Modern Wales.

From Welsh Labour’s pledge for a Minister for Digital to Plaid Cymru’s “test and learn” 100-day plan, there are promising signs of the systemic thinking we advocated for. However, our analysis reveals a growing gap between the hype of “silver bullet” technologies like AI and the unglamorous, essential work of fixing the “digital plumbing” - the shared infrastructure and ways of working required for a resilient state.

A significant divide has also emerged regarding state capacity: can we really transform our services while cutting the very specialists needed to build them? We’ve broken down the manifestos of the six major parties to highlight where they hit the mark and where they risk falling back into the trap of “digital wallpaper.” Read our full breakdown to see which visions for 2026 offer a genuine path toward a modern Welsh state.

This month’s digital news in Cymru

How can leaders build resilience in an era of digital uncertainty?
In a new podcast from Public Digital, Transform Wales’ Dai Vaughan is part of a panel discussing how leaders can build resilience in an era of digital uncertainty. They explore real-world examples of organisational resilience and the lessons leaders can take away.

What making toast taught us about designing better health services
Ayala Gordon explains how a service mapping workshop at Digital Health and Care Wales used a simple “making toast” exercise to show that even familiar tasks look different from different perspectives. By then mapping a real patient journey together, colleagues from different disciplines uncovered new insights quickly and showed how user-centred design can reduce duplication, improve decisions and create better services for patients.

Using a simple pattern to increase user feedback on our forms
Lucinda Pierce explains how Natural Resources Wales increased feedback on online forms by asking users a simple yes/no question after they submit a form, inviting them to complete a short anonymous survey. The change lifted response rates to around 30% and gave teams practical insight to improve services, from clearer guidance and better file uploads to shaping future payment options.

The anatomy of UCD part 2: C is for centred
Monika Mani Swiatek argues that user-centred design should not be treated as focusing only on users, but as a way to balance user needs with policy, technology, operations and delivery realities. She makes the case for multidisciplinary teams, shared ownership and involving UCD from the start so services are designed end to end rather than shaped by silos or added in too late.

Bad Services Podcast
Lou Downe and Sarah Drummond are back with a new podcast series, Bad Services, exploring why so many services fail and what it takes to fix them. Through honest conversations and practical insight, the series looks at what’s broken in organisations and how to design services that work better for people.

Building Successful Communities of Practice Second Edition
Emily Webber’s new edition of Building Successful Communities of Practice explores how communities help people connect, learn and improve work across organisational boundaries. Drawing on practical experience, the book offers guidance on how to create, grow and sustain communities of practice, avoid common pitfalls and build the conditions for long-term success.

Trapped in MS Office
This longread from iA argues that Europe’s reliance on Microsoft Office reflects a wider dependency on US technology and that simply switching to open-source clones will not solve the problem. Instead, it calls for a new “post-Office” model of work built around simpler, collaborative and structured tools that focus more on thinking and communication than formatting documents.

The sAccessible podcast
Hosted by Fernando Loizides and Joanna Goodwin, sAccessible explores accessibility through real experiences, practical insight and expert perspectives. Covering topics from design and technology to policy and lived experience, it shows why accessibility is not a niche issue but essential to the future of services and spaces.

Upcoming events

Design Swansea - 7 May at Urban HQ at 6:30pm
A Design Swansea meetup with talks from Luke Stanton and Nisha Harichandran.