With is an award-winning, Toronto & Hollywood-based design studio that works at the intersection of design, social equity, and climate justice. Built on a "with, not for" methodology, the studio partners directly with communities, nonprofits, and public-sector organizations to co-create solutions grounded in lived experience and collective input.
As generative AI tools became increasingly present in partner conversations and across the design industry, With's team began experimenting with tools like ChatGPT and Claude on an informal, individual basis. However, the studio had no shared guidelines governing how, when, or why these tools should be used — and that absence created a growing gap between day-to-day experimentation and the intentional, values-aligned practice the studio's mission required.
The risks were compounding from multiple directions. Fragmented approaches across the team meant no way to ensure consistency or alignment with the studio's commitments to social equity and human-centered design. Privacy and consent vulnerabilities were going unaddressed — a serious concern for a studio that works closely with community partners, governments, and funders. Meanwhile, the rapid proliferation of AI marketing narratives made it genuinely difficult to distinguish real capability from overstatement, and partners had begun asking about With's position on AI without the studio having a clear framework to point to.
The turning point came from watching the consequences of AI proliferation unfold in real time: cognitive and mental health impacts, the environmental and community costs of AI infrastructure, and the ways AI companies were enabling surveillance and military harm. With could not keep using these tools informally while those consequences continued to accumulate.
Phase 1: AI Literacy & Team Alignment (Weeks 1–2)
A curated pre-reading curriculum, followed by two-expert facilitated, interactive workshops, established shared understanding across the full team. The first session dove into risks, responsibilities, and considerations — covering AI foundations, data governance and privacy, security and surveillance, power concentration and structural risks, and ethical and societal impact including labour-market disruption, cognitive dependency, hidden environmental costs, algorithmic bias, and digital colonialism. The second session explored the current AI landscape: limitations and risks in creative contexts, tools most relevant to studios (including MCP, HeyGen, ElevenLabs, Veo 3, and Kling), and forward-looking projections at the 1-, 3-, and 5-year horizons with corresponding societal and regulatory implications.
A collaborative AI risk heat map activity allowed team members to surface their specific concerns and priorities, providing structured input that directly shaped the policy development work that followed.
Phase 2: Responsible AI Policy Co-Design (Weeks 3–6)
Building on the shared understanding from Phase 1, The Opening Door facilitated an iterative policy development process with With's executive team. Two draft versions of the AI policy were each followed by executive feedback sessions, allowing leadership to interrogate, refine, and deepen the framework based on the studio's actual operations and client relationships. The finalized Responsible AI Guidelines established clear principles for AI use, defined prohibited use cases, and provided practical criteria for evaluating AI tools against With's values — addressing privacy, consent, environmental impact, and downstream harms.
•Two facilitated workshops, with a curated pre-reading curriculum
•An AI risk mapping activity, surfacing societal and studio-specific exposures
•A prioritized findings report, pairing each risk with actionable recommendations
•Responsible AI commitments, formulated for adoption into the studio's client service agreements
The engagement produced a meaningful shift in how With's team understands and discusses AI. The anxiety generated by ambiguity decreased substantially, replaced by informed confidence and shared language that team members can reference when questioning AI use or making decisions about when and how to adopt tools.
With's Responsible AI commitments have since become part of the studio's standard service agreement templates, binding both With and its partners to responsible, transparent AI use — strengthening trust with the partners and funders who had been asking about the studio's approach. The guidelines are rooted in With's co-design ethos of multi-disciplinary input and iterative refinement, which means they are designed as a living foundation the studio can adapt as AI technologies and their impacts continue to develop.
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