My PhD
Title:
Human-Centred AI Systems to Inspire Swansea City Residents to Engage in Creative Placemaking
Stakeholder:
City & County of Swansea Council
The Research:
Recent advances in machine learning systems provide the opportunity to automatically create “reasonable” quality text, images or music from relatively sparse inputs. What is “reasonable” is of course debatable. However, the opportunities afforded by machine
learning frameworks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is already considerable. Companies such as OpenAI are building neural network models that take sparse inputs and generate sentences or paragraphs (GPT-3), images (DALL-E) or learn visual
concepts from language (CLIP). The potential for these kinds of technologies is that they could new ways to engage people in creative activities that are highly personalized (system inputs based on the user’s passions) and more likely engaging as a result.
The goal of “something magical for visitors” would guide the public engagement aspects of the project and their role in creative placemaking. The project as currently envisaged would be structured as discrete experiments that use technologies to surprise and delight users in order to better understand how and why people engage both with and in Swansea’s cultural spaces. Part of these experiments will include a site-specific Experience Centre, a space where visitors engage with art-based technologies and activities. The research questions therefore will emerge from the practice of building, deploying and testing. Example HCI domains the project will cover include:
Interactive Screens
1. Review of existing of existing responsive screen software/hardware used in retail or exhibition
2. Review of selected references that are relevant to Swansea
3. Prototype screen installation(s) for deployment within Swansea and engagement data gathering Digital Generative Art
4. Review of existing of existing state-of –the-art public facing digital and generative art used in major international cities and/or galleries
5. Review of selected reference cases for digital and generative arts that are most relevant to Swansea