Dave Gottwald is an award-winning visual designer, design educator, and writer with extensive experience in design for user experience and interaction, print and digital media, and within the built environment. Areas of expertise include creative direction, brand strategy, identity work, naming and copywriting, exhibit design, publications, digital experiences, and marketing campaigns. He is deeply interested in history, immersion, and storytelling; in exhibit spaces, in print, online, and on devices.
Currently Associate Professor in the Art and Design Department of the College of Art & Architecture at the University of Idaho, Dave teaches UI/UX for mobile, experiential design for the built environment, exhibit design, typography, digital imaging, and design history. His research explores the theming of consumer spaces, the genealogy and taxonomy of thematic design, and the liminal blur between the built environment and the virtual.
Dave is a co-editor for and contributor to Virtual Interiorities, a three-volume collection now available in eBook and softcover from Carnegie Mellon ETC Press. The collection links ongoing discussions in the humanities, film, game studies, architecture, and design disciplines under the aegis of what “virtual” means in a socio-spatial context.
Along with Greg Turner-Rahman, he was the recipient of the 2019 Design Incubation Writing Fellowship and the 2020 Constructed Environment International Award for Excellence for their current collaboration, The End of Architecture: Our World as a Set, from Theme Parks and Video Games to Virtual Reality (forthcoming, Intellect Books / The University of Chicago Press). He is also co-author of Disney and the Theming of the Contemporary Zoo: Kingdoms of Artifice for the Studies in Disney and Culture series (forthcoming, Lexington Books).
He has also been published in Disegno—Journal of Design Culture, The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, The International Journal of the Constructed Environment, The International Journal of the Image, and Landscape Research Record.
Themerica™ began as my MFA design thesis. I started the research in earnest in the summer of 2007, and maintained a travel/photography blog through 2008 which is archived here. Upon taking a professorship at the University of Idaho in 2016, I have recommitted to this work as my creative scholarship focus. As I continue my research, this blog will serve as a home for travel photography and site analysis.