Empowering a Creative City: Engage Citizens in Creating Street Art through Human-AI Collaboration

A "creative city" can promote creativity among its citizens and provide them fulfilling lived experience. Such a concept has captivated city authorities worldwide, and motivated plenty of works to investigate how to make our cities more "creative". We argue that there is a need and an opportunity to design interactive technologies to push the creative city agenda. In this paper, we present WeMonet, a design prototype supporting citizens engaging in participatory street art creation via human-AI collaboration. Citizens' sketches are synthesized, enhanced to be more vivid through machine machine learning algorithms, and projected on a screen, forming a participatory artwork. WeMonet aims to promote citizens' engagement in creative practices and hence the city's creativity. More broadly speaking, we hope this work could inspire designers to consider the role of interaction design in the creative city agenda.