Dr Sara Jones is a Reader in Creative Interactive System Design in the Faculty of Management at Bayes Business School, Director of the Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, and Course Director for the interdisciplinary Master’s in Innovation Creativity and Leadership (MICL). She is currently completing work as a Co-Investigator of the Innovation for African Universities (IAU) programme, funded by the British Council. The IAU programme has sought to strengthen the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem and improve student employability outcomes in Sub Saharan African universities in 5 countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, UK), 80+ organisations (including 50+ universities in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa), 35 projects involving 300+ academics and colleagues in entrepreneurial ecosystems, and impacting over 7000 students in 2 years. Sara is exploring links between creativity, innovation, leadership and resilience, building on work with colleagues as Principal Investigator of the Boosting Resilience project, funded by Arts Council England, and using a combination of arts-based methods, applied creativity and business thinking to deliver creative enterprise training to students and entrepreneurs in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan in two Creative Spark projects, funded by the British Council. From 2011 – 2015 Sara was a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City University, and from 2006 - 2011, she held an RCUK Research Fellowship in creativity applied to design and engineering, with a particular focus on the design of interactive systems. Ongoing research interests include the use of new and emerging technologies to support creative processes, as well as the application of creative requirements and design techniques in both small and large-scale software and service development projects. Sara has been a Principal/Co-Investigator on a number of AHRC-, JISC-, EU- and bilaterally funded research projects worth over £10million, over £1million of which has come to City. She has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, supervised 9 PhD students, taught a wide range of different courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and consulted for a number of major organisations. Creativity in the Design of Adaptive and Sustainable Interactive Systems This paper explores the role of creative thinking in the specification and design of complex socio-technical systems, with a particular focus on adaptive and sustainable systems. Drawing on early work in domains such as air traffic control, we reflect on how creative thinking was initially introduced using simple tools like paper post-its, before evolving through the use of digital creativity support tools to today’s powerful generative AI technologies. These technologies are now widely used to produce creative outputs in fields such as marketing and product development but their application in the context of adaptive and sustainable system design has so far not been widely reported. Here we will argue that the same principles that were developed to support the design of early digital creativity support tools may still today provide a useful guide, not only for our use of tools such as generative artificial intelligence while developing new systems, but also for the design of the adaptive and sustainable interactive systems themselves, in ways that support and augment their users’ creative thinking, to find new ways to adapt, and better approaches to long term sustainable solutions.