Events

KLI Colloquia are invited research talks of about an hour followed by 30 min discussion. The talks are held in English, open to the public, and offered in hybrid format. 

 

Fall-Winter 2025-2026 KLI Colloquium Series

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5881861923?omn=85945744831
Meeting ID: 588 186 1923

 

25 Sept 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

A Dynamic Canvas Model of Butterfly and Moth Color Patterns

Richard Gawne (Nevada State Museum)

 

14 Oct 2025 (Tues) 3-4:30 PM CET

Vienna, the Laboratory of Modernity

Richard Cockett (The Economist)

 

23 Oct 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

How Darwinian is Darwinian Enough? The Case of Evolution and the Origins of Life

Ludo Schoenmakers (KLI)

 

6 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Common Knowledge Considered as Cause and Effect of Behavioral Modernity

Ronald Planer (University of Wollongong)

 

20 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Rates of Evolution, Time Scaling, and the Decoupling of Micro- and Macroevolution

Thomas Hansen (University of Oslo)

 

RESCHEDULED: 18 Dec (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Chance, Necessity, and the Evolution of Evolvability

Cristina Villegas (KLI)

 

8 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Embodied Rationality: Normative and Evolutionary Foundations

Enrico Petracca (KLI)

 

15 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

On Experimental Models of Developmental Plasticity and Evolutionary Novelty

Patricia Beldade (Lisbon University)

 

29 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

O Theory Where Art Thou? The Changing Role of Theory in Theoretical Biology in the 20th Century and Beyond

Jan Baedke (Ruhr University Bochum)

Event Details

KLI Brown Bag
‘Insights into Insight’: Data from the Design Realm – Conceptual Clarification Across Disciplines — Potential links to EvoDevo
Stefan WILTSCHNIG (Copenhagen Business School)
2013-11-28 13:15 - 2013-11-28 13:15
KLI
Organized by KLI

Topic description:
Reports of insights or "aha!” moments as source of innovative ideas at the core of creative processes fascinate people since Archimedes’ "Eureka!" discovery. Anecdotes about "insights" leading to key findings by renowned scientists like Helmholtz and Poincaré have built the starting points for researchers of productive thinking and gestalt psychologists’ takes on creative problem solving in the first half of the 20th century. They have paved the way for various approaches in creativity research to studying insights after WW2 up until the 1990s. Unresolved debates about the status of insights between "normal thinking" and "special processes" as well as growing criticism regarding the ill / too broadly defined concept has led to fading scholarly interest especially in (cognitive-)psychology after that. Recent contributions to the neuroscience of creativity show a regained interest in insight phenomena. Very often the approaches and study designs remain at the level of simply transferring cognitive psychology lab tasks (i.e., RAT) to fMRI studies though, without resolving any of the underlying conceptual issues. In order to be able to make contributions to clarifying them, it seems favorable to deploy an "in vivo" approach parallel to "in-vitro" studies and collect more "real world" data of creative processes to elucidate the status of insights and "aha!” moments in them. In my talk I am therefore going to present (video)ethnographic data of design teams collected during my PhD project, and discuss potential pathways for further conceptual clarification across various disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches. Triggered by the work on one of my recent articles I look forward to conversations to potentially inspire design studies and creativity research through analogies and heuristics from state of the art EvoDevo theories.

Biographical note:
Stefan Wiltschnig works as Creativity Researcher and PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School. In his PhD project, funded by the EU FP 7 initial training network "DESIRE - Creative Design for Innovation in Science and Technology," he is studying insight moments in creative processes using a multidisciplinary approach between cognitive science, management, and design thinking. At the core is the passion to develop his knowing about what spurs creativity and enables fruitful cooperation. He is trained as telecommunication engineer and graduated in business administration from WU Vienna with majors in entrepreneurship and innovation as well as process and project management. Additionally he has studied Cognitive Science at the Universities of Vienna and Ljubljana.