A bigger Hockney

Color and illumination in the Hockney theory: A critical evaluation

Recently it has been claimed that some early Renaissance painters used concave mirrors to project real inverted images onto their supports (paper, canvas, oak panel, ...) which they then traced or painted over, and that this was a key source of an apparent increase in naturalism and realism in European painting around 1420. This bold theory makes implicit and explicit assumptions about the illu...

Bigger than a Ballot Box

Usability, from a Bigger Picture

This paper presents the strategy of Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade, a Brazilian consultancy firm, to spread the usability concept among consumers and companies in a way that no other company has ever done in Brazil. The strategy made usability news in the media and it is benefiting consumers, companies and professionals of user experience all over the country.

Art, Optics and History: New Light on the Hockney Thesis

David Hockney’s recent book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters argues that 15thcentury painters employed optical devices to achieve realistic portraiture. A reexamination of the history of optical projection techniques raises problems for Hockney’s provoc-

The bigger picture concepts

If a concept is not well defined, it can be abused. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated a range of intellectual fields from physics to linguistics, but with no underlying, unified theory. Complexity has become a popular buzzword that is used in the hope of gaining attention or funding — institutes and research networks associated ...