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Non-human elements are not static. They are constantly evolving (Ingold 2012): they change according to the transformations of the socio-technical network. First, because they are manipulated and transformed by the other actors of the innovation. Second, and more subtly, because their very properties are redefined according to the uses and other entities. For example, according to the phases of the innovation trajectory of kitesurfing (Boutroy et al. 2014), waves were initially “reliefs” that slowed down and disrupted an unmanageable glide, focused on speed; whereas later, new users with modified gear perceived them as “tremors”, or means of making them allies that they could collaborate with to reinvent the practice in an acrobatic mode. Symmetrically, human actors and their behaviors can thus be modified in return by the non-human elements with, or through which, they associate in the innovation.

Put another way, objects can have agentivity, that is, they have capacities to make humans act: they obstruct, incite, enable, associate, mediate (Latour 2006; Quéré 2015). For example, the Joëlette is a single-wheel supported-traction chair that allows severely disabled people to access hiking trails. Because of its shape and weight, it mobilizes and associates several conveyors and accompaniers who must be one with each other to move. The socio-technical choices stabilized in this innovation (in particular the absence of motorization) make the machine a hybrid between man and things that creates interdependence, and therefore attachment (in all senses of the term: material, social, sensory and affective) between disabled and able-bodied actors (Kasprzak and Perrin 2017).