Many current approaches to net zero and public engagement render the temporal implications of change for people and communities as essentially invisible. This paper demonstrates how creative design techniques and methods drawn from SHAPE-based research can help address this gap, through augmenting public engagement with situated, active, and energised aspects of human experience as lived in and through time—something referred to here as human and societal ‘liveliness’. Creative design techniques are presented from public engagement projects on local energy system change, domestic heating decarbonisation, and community energy. Liveliness as something that comes with temporal understanding can and should be made integral to public engagements for net zero.