HCI has material attributes. As a sociotechnical assemblage, HCI mediates and/or translates technologies to public(s) and vice versa. It is malleable, ‘made’ and crafted and as a material media technology changes our relationships to ‘things’, each other and our surrounding world. Thinking through HCI as material allows us to unite disciplines with technologies, ensuring that how we conceptualise work is tangible and applicable. Working from this understanding of HCI, allows the authors to contextualise Engagements2 as an emerging ‘material’ space uniting art, design and other practices often fractured through disciplinary conventions. Traditionally, public engagement encompasses ways organisations engage with external parties. HCI contemporaries, Public Interest Technologies (PITs) empower public stakeholders and municipalities. PITs unravel intractable problems, through design, data, and delivery, thus providing user agency and yields wider societal benefit(s).

We question how digital technologies can transition ‘public(s)’, to sustainable approaches. In time, Engagements2 will be commonplace as technologies (PITs, augmented reality, IoT sensing and more) are embedded into public environment(s), if engagement can be defined as a ‘craft-able’, material concern. The article unites contemporaries in: the public realm, social design, and public engagement methods to identify the: pitfalls, benefits, and opportunities. There is a need for creating a ‘best practice’ roadmap to creative, active engagement. These values go well beyond designing for inclusion and seek for more sustainable and integral interactions, impacts and culture creation.