Simon has linked to a couple of papers on materiality in social research that he has written [in partnership with Simon Blyth of Unilever] that are well worth reading. Most stuff around Actor Network Theory [ANT] doesn’t seem that helpful to the average researcher doing research, in fact most Social Science ‘theory’ seems elitist and irrelevant to me. But whilst ANT and particularly Bruno Latour’s work is [in my opinion] probably the best thing to happen to Social Science in the last fifty years it hasn’t made a huge impact in terms of telling stories about the world to inform better design. Simon’s papers’ are of the few I’ve seen that try to make materiality matter to a wider audience. Why?
Well, I think we tend to anthropomorphisise materiality and / or consign non-human things to the status of second class citizens. This is mostly as a result of the belief in ‘agency’ residing only with ‘us’ when actually the ability to have effects resides in everything, but only as a result of a coming together with other ‘things’, what ANT is all about; networks of association. And being drilled in a humanist reading of life that’s hard to take. We like to think of ourselves as special 
That said many of the people writing around design and experience design in particular seem to be influenced by "materiality". Terms like ‘affordance’ seem to spring up in conversations I have with people in design, so there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it’s important. But in terms of doing the background to inform design it’s tough to know where to start. My old superviser once said to me – when I was struggling to get to grips with how to research materiality – that ANT was basically about being as granular in ethnographic work as possible and not taking anything as a given. That helped.
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Good post James – Simon’s work definitely deserves greater exposure!
But I think you might be relying on an unnecessarily rigid theory/method divide here, as I was taught during my PhD that ANT’s great strength is methodological more than theoretical – which, incidently, is what your final point seems to suggest as well. And if I may say so, it’s also overgeneralised condemnations of social theory like this that make it that much harder for me to justify my work as a qualitative researcher in these areas!
As for the question of materiality – well, I couldn’t agree more
Before turning to STS studies I worked as an archaeologist, and I bring that knowledge of material culture to pretty much everything I do concerning technology and design. And as I’m sure you’re aware, the field of material culture studies is actually thriving – but almost always overlooked by the technologists and designers I’ve encountered.
As we know, there are no social relations that aren’t also material relations. I agree that the question of non-human agency is particularly hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but things like good participant observation and ethnographic interviewing should make these inter-relations clear enough that the concept of agency can be re-defined or re-situated in a way that it more palatable to humanists – and useful to designers.
PS – I’m not sure if you still keep up with Nigel’s work, but I think this paper of his from last year offers some useful observations along these lines.