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Objective: Although relatively costly and non-scalable, non-invasive neuromodulation interventions are treatment alternatives for neuropsychiatric disorders. The recent developments of highly-deployable transcranial electric stimulation (tES) systems, combined with mobile-Health technologies, could be incorporated in digital trials to overcome methodological barriers and increase equity of access. The study aims are to discuss the implementation of tES digital trials by performing a systematic scoping review and strategic process mapping, evaluate methodological aspects of tES digital trial designs, and provide Delphi-based recommendations for implementing digital trials using tES.Methods: We convened 61 highly-productive specialists and contacted 8 tES companies to assess 71 issues related to tES digitalization readiness, and processes, barriers, advantages, and opportunities for implementing tES digital trials. Delphi-based recommendations (>60% agreement) were provided.Results: The main strengths/opportunities of tES were: (i) non-pharmacological nature (92% of agreement), safety of these techniques (80%), affordability (88%), and potential scalability (78%). As for weaknesses/threats, we listed insufficient supervision (76%) and unclear regulatory status (69%). Many issues related to methodological biases did not reach consensus. Device appraisal showed moderate digitalization readiness, with high safety and potential for trial implementation, but low connectivity.Conclusions: Panelists recognized the potential of tES for scalability, generalizability, and leverage of digital trials processes; with no consensus about aspects regarding methodological biases. Significance: We further propose and discuss a conceptual framework for exploiting shared aspects between mobile-Health tES technologies with digital trials methodology to drive future efforts for digitizing tES trials. (C) 2022 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Although relatively costly and non-scalable, non-invasive neuromodulation interventions are treatment alternatives for neuropsychiatric disorders. The recent developments of highly-deployable transcranial electric stimulation (tES) systems, combined with mobile-Health technologies, could be incorporated in digital trials to overcome methodological barriers and increase equity of access. We convened 61 highly-productive specialists and contacted 8 tES companies to assess 71 issues related to tES digitalization readiness, and processes, barriers, advantages, and opportunities for implementing tES digital trials. Delphi-based recommendations (>60% agreement) were provided. Device appraisal showed moderate digitalization readiness, with high safety and the possibility of trial implementation, but low connectivity. Panelists recognized the potential of tES for scalability, generalizability, and leverage of digital trials processes; although they reached no consensus about aspects regarding methodological biases. We further propose and discuss a conceptual framework for exploiting shared aspects between mobile-Health tES technologies with digital trials methodology to drive future efforts for digitizing tES trials.Graphical Abstract. Consensus Roadmap(A) Recruitment process. The study procedure started with defining the components of the research problem by the core research team. After defining the problems, two different sets of participants (the steering committee (SC) including key leaders of the field identified by the core team and the expert panel (EP) as a more diverse group of experts identified based on the number of publications based on a systematic review) were identified and were invited to participate in a Delphi study. The study facilitators (first and last authors) led the communications with the SC to design the initial questionnaire through an iterative approach. (B) Evidence synthesis: To collect the available evidence, companies producing portable tES (ptES) devices were contacted, based on the companies suggested by the SC and EP to provide details about the available devices. For mapping methodological processes of digitizing tES trials, two distinct strategies were performed and embedded into the questionnaire, namely SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customer) and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) assessment were performed and embedded into the questionnaire. (C) Consensus development: In the next phase, the questionnaire was validated and finalized via collecting and summarizing opinions. Afterward, the SC and EP responded to the final questionnaire, and results were analyzed providing a list of recommendations for running tES digital trials based on a pre-registered consensus threshold.

This paper investigates the potential involvement of “epistemic uncertainty” in mediating between complex design requirements and strategic switches in software design strategies. The analysis revealed that the designers produced an initial “first-pass” solution to the given design brief in a breadth-first manner, with this solution addressing several easy-to-handle requirements. The designers then focused on adding relatively complex-to-handle requirements to this initial solution in what appeared to be a depth-first manner, as reflected, for example, by detailed mental simulations that spanned many transcript segments. Furthermore, such depth-first development of complex requirements was linked to increases in epistemic uncertainty, a finding that supports the predicted role of uncertainty in mediating between complex requirements and depth-first design. Overall these findings support a view of software design as involving a mixed breadth-first and depth-first solution development approach, with strategic switching to depth-first design being triggered by requirement complexity and being mediated by associated feelings of uncertainty.

Despite existing enthusiasm and evidence for the effectiveness of innovative forms of educating and learning changing practices in educational systems is challenging as centuries old practices are ingrained in political and organizational structures that naturally resist change. This resistance to change is relevant to the topic of assessment within educational settings as methods for assessing student output through exams are still pre-dominant and innovative ways of assessing are rare. This chapter will focus on assessment of creativity and how it is applicable within an educational setting with an emphasis on assessing not only the student output but the creative process as a whole. The creative process is a phenomenon that every student goes through during his or hers education, whether it is identified as such or not. Significance should be attributed to efforts made by students throughout their creative processes rather than only focusing on their final output, as a creative process does not guarantee a creative output. Students and teachers alike can learn and benefit from considering the creative process, and an assessment method appropriate to fulfil the task of assessing the process will be introduced and its applicability portrayed.

This paper reports an experiment on the topic design fixation using 12 teams of masters students working on three design problems from (Jansson and Smith 1991). The objective of the experiment is to determine the effectiveness of two interventions to help overcome fixation on example solutions. The first intervention consisted of educating each team on the phenomena and effects of design fixation. The results showed that this intervention reduced the number of fixation elements in comparison to the control group (p=0.025). The second intervention involved using Dix et al (2006) 'Bad Ideas' method during a final design task. The results showed that the method did not help the teams as it caused the fixation ratio to increase and the number of ideas per team to decrease. In addition to the above mentioned interventions, the experiment also revealed a negative correlation between the number of ideas produced per group and the groups' fixation ratios, adding to the quantity breads novelty debate. Finally, the study also provided further evidence of the hypothesis by Agogu et al (2011) that example solutions constructed from restrictive partitions have a greater fixation affect.

As creativity becomes increasingly recognized as important rawmaterial for innovation, the importance of identifying ways to increasepractitioners’ creativity through rigorously designed creativity trainingprograms is highlighted. Therefore we sat out to design a creativity trainingprogram specifically developed for innovation practitioners. Our aim, inaddition to making a program based on a rigor scientific foundation, was todevelop a program which would be relevant for practitioners, theoreticallysound, as well as realistic for real world context. This we accomplished, inpart, through the transdisciplinary study described in this paper. Co-creationwas employed as a method to ensure the three layers of focus would be takeninto consideration. The result is a program called Creative Awareness Trainingwhich is based on the new Know-Recognize-React model.