The place of artifacts in social processes. Reflections about a social technology experience in Bariloche, Argentina

This article aims to reflect on the process of co-construction of knowledge, oriented to social technology development, from a critical analysis of an experience located in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche (Argentina). From a non-neutralist perspective of technology, we focus our questions around the materiality of the experience analyzed, specifically in technological artifacts. The objective of the article is to inquire into the idea of human and non-human actors' agency and, especially, the type of relationships that can occur between them. The methodological perspective, of a territorial and situated character, is enrolled in the field of qualitative methodologies. The central procedure is the workshop where meet the different actors who participate in the process, in which the dialogue of knowledge takes place. To deploy this perspective we present the interplay of meanings that emerge from the field experience and some academic discussions proposed by Bruno Latour and Alejandro Haber. The results showed a series of elements which manifested a place of the artifact in these processes that did not correspond to "the excuse", as it was defined in its beginnings: the actors-artifacts relationship was configured from other senses. On the one hand, we note that one of the meanings of the artifacts was the "channel" for communication: the objects became fundamental for the dialogue of knowledge enabling a support for empirical knowledge linked to the office of carpentry. On the other hand, we understood that the various instances of partial progress of technological development, translated into their material plane, were generating moments of affirmation necessary to continue the process.