Ever heard a programmer say “I think the code’s trying to tell us something”? A joke, right? A metaphor. There’s a social world, where people tell people things, and there’s a world of objects that, at most, exert passive pressure.

But what if we deny that the two worlds are separate? What if we treat everything as a moving mashup of objects, ideas, individuals, and groups? This workshop will present some recent perspectives from sociology on that question, and will ask participants the following: if you believed in one of those perspectives, what would you do differently on your project?