CONCEPT
AI Practice (Wenger Reading)
The Berkeley researchers' prescription for AI-augmented workplaces — structured pauses, sequenced workflows, protected human-only time — reinterpreted through Wenger's framework as the participatory spaces where communal knowledge is generated and maintained.
The Berkeley researchers whose study You On AI discusses proposed what they called 'AI Practice' — structured pauses built into the workday, sequenced rather than parallel work, protected time for human-only interaction. Wenger's framework provides the theoretical justification for this proposal that the researchers' own formulation did not fully articulate: the pauses are not respites from work. They are the participatory spaces in which communal knowledge is generated and maintained. They are where learning happens, in the specific sense of learning as the transformation of participation in a social practice. Without them, AI-augmented work produces output without producing practice — capability without the communal wisdom that keeps capability pointed toward ends worth pursuing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The prescription runs counter to the logic of the tools themselves. AI is optimized for efficiency; the spaces required for participatory meaning-making are, by efficiency standards, wasteful. Conversations that meander, debates that do not resolve cleanly, reflections that do not