Doctor Greg Hughes

I am a Lecturer in the Design (Visual Communications) program at Western Sydney University. As a practitioner working across design, media art, and music, I bring an interdisciplinary approach to teaching, research and community engagement.

I specialise in teaching Motion Design, Web Design, Interactive Design, user experience design (UX/UI) and emergent modes of digital production and publishing. Through these disciplines, I equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. My teaching and supervision integrate theoretical knowledge with practical digital production skills, providing comprehensive project-based learning. I focus on developing students as both problem solvers and problem seekers, preparing them for the evolving demands of visual communications practice while empowering them to use design as a vehicle for change.

I am a firm believer in creative practice and output as research—the generation and transfer of knowledge through making and doing. My focus is on non-traditional research outputs (NTRO). Through my work, I actively seek to spark curiosity and engagement with significant topics and important or fragile sites by exploring the disruption, combination and distortion of communication channels and signals—human and more-than-human. My work deliberately moves away from strict empirical data representation, instead creating expressive data visualisation and sonifications that reveal patterns and relationships across different signal networks. I aim to bring clarity to complex narratives via experiential design.

I hold a PhD from the University of Wollongong, where my research developed a theory of 'trace' for understanding how signals move across hybrid analogue-digital systems. Drawing on Media Archaeology, this work examines the cultural techniques embedded in media technologies and their implications for how we understand reproduction, representation, and reality. My dissertation, "Articulations of Trace: Analogue-Digital Conversion in The Age of Transversal Reproduction," provides the theoretical foundation for my ongoing practice-led research into signal processing and environmental communication.