Dave Gottwald is an award-winning visual designer, design educator, and writer. His research explores the theming of consumer spaces and interplay between the built and the virtual. Gottwald is currently Associate Professor in the Art and Design Department of the College of Art & Architecture at the University of Idaho where he teaches interaction design, experiential design for the built environment, and exhibit design.
His most recent publication is “Spatialized Animation: The Multiplane Camera and the Disney Dark Ride.” Gottwald is also co-author of Disney and the Theming of the Contemporary Zoo: Kingdoms of Artifice (forthcoming, Lexington Books).
Animate(d) Architecture now available in ebook and Hardcover
“The Multiplane Camera and the Disney Dark Ride”
Animate(d) Architecture: A Spatial Investigation of the Moving Image is a collection edited by Vahid Vahdat and published by Liverpool University Press. The volume examines animation from a spatial lens. It offers interdisciplinary outlooks to the role of space in animation, including in creating humorous moments in early cartoon shorts, generating action and suspense in Japanese anime, and even stimulating erotic pleasure in pornographic Hentai. Animation, in this book, is approached as a medium that can equip the designers of the built environment with a utopian scope to address our socio-political and ecological crises.
In my chapter, I describe how Disney’s dark ride model represents a kind of spatialized animation, and I further suggest it is a forgotten conceptual link between animation, the theme park, and today’s first-person gamified and virtual worlds.
Virtual Interiorities now available in ebook and softcover
”Realizing the Film Set as Virtual Performer”
Virtual Interiorities is a three-volume, co-edited collection published by Carnegie Mellon ETC Press. In addition to co-editing and providing my own introduction and chapter for Book Three, I collaborated with Gregory Turner-Rahman on the cover designs and produced the book layouts myself using CSS 4 exclusively.
Book One: When Worlds Collide
Book Two: the Myth of Total Virtuality
Book Three: Senses of Space and Place
DISEGNO—THE JOURNAL OF DESIGN CULTURE
“Total Cinema, Total Theatre, Total World”
This issue of Disegno—The Journal of Design Culture, a special call in English, “investigates, from the perspective of design culture, the contemporary role and significance of cinema, film, VR and moving image installations within the context of the institutional, technological, and media-related developments and lifeworld in the twenty-first century.”
My article was chosen as the lead piece for the issue's theme Total Cinema: Film and Design which seeks to interrogate French film theorist André Bazin in new ways. Disegno—The Journal of Design Culture is published by the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary.
Design Principles and Practices Annual Review
”The Disney Theme Park Model as User Experience: Designing for Guests”
I’ve long thought about the connections between the theme park model and contemporary user experience design, particularly how the plan of the original Disneyland park can be thought of as a kind of spatial user interface. This piece was in gestation for quite a while, evolving from invited guest lectures in various classes to a virtual conference talk in 2022 and now an article. I’m proud to finally see it published in the new Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review where I submitted it for peer review by invitation.
The End of Architecture:
our world as a set, from theme parks and video games to virtual reality
Along with Gregory Turner-Rahman, I received the 2019 Design Incubation Writing Fellowship for our current collaboration, Our World As A Set, from Theme Parks and Video Games to Virtual Reality: The End of Architecture (forthcoming, Intellect Books). The End of Architecture charts a new, interwoven history of animation, film, theme parks, video games, and virtual reality and establishes a fresh approach for thinking about environments. With this monograph, we define and explore five spatial regimes which have moved us beyond traditional architecture: filmic, thematic, electronic, holistic, and finally the emic.