Increasingly public sector practitioners are turning to design to help them do more with less. This often takes the form of designing tools or resources that are used by public sector workers in their everyday practice. This paper critically examines the practice of tool design with the aspiration to improve creative engagement (that is, novel interactions that result in the creation of new knowledge or understanding in the public sector). We assert that designers should not be attempting to define what is a 'right' or 'wrong' way to use an engagement tool, but instead seek to enable new interpretations and adaptations of tools so the creativity of practitioners is supported and amplified. We present a proposal for a framework that supports people in organising the multitude of creative engagement tools in a manner that is meaningful to them rather than imposing taxonomies form the outside, enabling them to fix their own meanings, significance and use of the tools they use. To explore this we present 2 use cases, one by IRISS (a leader in innovation in the social services in Scotland) and a second by Leapfrog (a research project led by Lancaster University looking to transform public sector engagement by design).We believe this change in the terms of reference when thinking about the creation and use of tools has profound implications for designers working in the social services and wider pubic services sector.

Our increasingly technologically-mediated world continues to pose challenges for design. Considering these we suggest that the digital products and services that surround us are haunted by 'ghosts in the machine'. These spectres bridge the physical with the digital, they broker competing relationships, and live among streams of data which cohere as algorithmic oceans causing precipitation of physical agency. Cast in this light, the ghosts in the machines of modern networked technologies represent aspects of designers' challenging relationships with the products and services they create. An emerging body of Post Anthropocentric theory offers conceptual 'jumping-off' points to engage with these challenges. In this paper we describe experiments that reflect and build on these theories. Through these we explore the possible foundations of accessible heuristics to aid in purposeful designerly apprehension of the difficult socio-technical complexities that are common among 21 st century technological assemblages.

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges. As a result, commodity industries are adopting sustainable supply-and value-chain models to make production more efficient, traceable and risk-averse. These top-down models often focus on giving higher prices to smallholder producers. While an important component of sustainability, this focus on farm-gate prices has shown mixed results in part because they are less effective in highlighting the asymmetrical power relationships and the socioeconomic and ecological complexity in high-value commodity production. Here, we use a novel method to measure and visualise changes in smallholder power in Madagascar's northeast 'vanilla triangle'-home to about 80% of the world's high quality vanilla. Our results reveal the paradox that during the recent price surge an overall increase in smallholders' multi-dimensional power to access economic benefits was accompanied by a decrease in many other equally important measures of sustainability. This illustrates how effective models for understanding global sustainable commodity chains should incorporate smallholders' perspectives that often emphasise complexity and uncertainty, and which aims to increase power and access for producers across both high and low price points.

Engagement practitioners (EP) work in diverse settings for UK public service providers in the UK to increase citizen participation in decision-making for those services. They use participation tools, including pro-formas and worksheets to aid participatory activities. We identify a tension between participation tool literature advocating for design of tools to disseminate participation methods to EPs, and tooluse literature demonstrating how tools can be modified in use. We ask how are participation tools used by EPs? What roles do instruction and flexibility of use play? How can EPs develop their participation practice through tool-use; and, how can those insights inform future tool design? In answer, findings and insights are presented from interviews with fifteen UK-based EPs conducted between October 2017 and May 2018. Three recommendations are made for the design of participation tools. This research has implications for social designers working in areas including participatory design, co-design or service design contexts.

Pervasive technologies are already transforming "The Future of Work." Mobile technologies, IoT, and data promise efficient and convenient work "on-demand." They are convenient too for platform providers whose clean and efficient interfaces for consumers disrupt marketplaces, offering digitally mediated access to services at a click. These same technologies provide access to work and labor markets whilst undermining promising flexible work and access to sufficient work. The global gig economy is expanding. Increasing numbers of workers see gig economy work as their main form of employment, yet have little voice in the construction of systems on which they depend. We argue that technologists must work with gig workers, policy makers, and other stakeholders to address the adverse effects of technologies on gig workers. To better understand relationships between workers and the technologies they use, we describe insights from research carried out with U.K. cycle couriers. We reflect on technology's role in giving these workers' agency, rights, and equity by design.