Dr. Lena Belin

Dr. Lena Belin Strategic Design Advisor

Soft Power: Designing the Infrastructure of Care

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Soft Power: Designing the Infrastructure of Care

Care is often seen as a personal value or a soft add-on—but what if it’s actually the missing infrastructure in how we design systems? From digital services to frontline delivery, many systems fail not because they’re broken, but because they were never built to hold the full weight of human need. In this talk, Lena introduces Soft Power—a way of seeing care not as sentiment, but as infrastructure: an invisible layer that shapes how people experience safety, trust, and belonging.

Drawing from her work across tech, government, and social sectors—as well as her own lived experience as a carer—she’ll explore why care is central to sustainable design, and how we can make it visible and intentional. The talk will introduce a framework for designing the Infrastructure of Care across four dimensions—relational, temporal, boundary, and integrative—and show how these can be embedded into services, experiences, and systems at every level.. You’ll walk away with a fresh lens for diagnosing service breakdowns, language to make care strategic, and tools to design more human, resilient systems.

Dr. Lena Belin

Lena is a strategic designer, social scientist, and advisor to organisations navigating complexity, growth, and change. With two decades across tech, government, health, education, and the social sector, she helps teams build better systems through design, insight, and care. Her work spans national transformation programs, customer experience strategy, and brand and service design, and has earned multiple awards for innovation and impact. Lena has partnered with organisations including Accenture, Atlassian, Qantas, Red Cross, kids helpline, ANZ, AustralianSuper, and the ATO. She is a Good Design Australia ambassador and juror, and regularly advises leaders and teams on designing services that are human, high-impact, and built to last.

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