Lancaster University is one of the eight institutions that was part of Equator, a six-year Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) supported by EPSRC. The IRC brought together researchers from a wide variety of disciplines that addressed the technical, social and design issues in the development of new inter-relationships between the physical and the digital. Work on Equator were based on experience projects and research challenges which led to the development of a number of technologies.

The Equator group at Lancaster University consisted of a multidisciplinary team with expertise from Ubiquitous Computing, Distributed Systems, Human Computer Interaction and Ethnomethodology. The team comprised of 6 academics, 14 researchers and 3 PhD students who worked on Equator-related projects over a different periods of time.

A few researchers were involved on a full-time basis but most worked on the project for a limited period. They brought in knowledge and experience from previous projects while also benefitting from use cases and collaboration within Equator, resulting in a positive impact on their future career. There were also a number of visiting staff/students who were closely involved with Equator-related work. They were effectively an additional resource to the project and in turn they benefitted from research training.

Our work at Lancaster focussed on learning through engagements with real end user communities by deploying and adapting technologies and infrastructures 'in the wild'. Through these experiences, we informed the design of novel devices and adaptive infrastructures, and explored new forms of interaction and ethnomethodological technique. Our main contributions lie in the following research activities:

This led to around 90 publications, including conference papers, journals, book sections, internal reports and workshops.

Equator case studies and technologies have been used in various courses. In some cases, entire modules and dissertation projects were based on Equator.