EM has been applied to a wide range of applications, principally through doctoral research and the 3rd year project work of undergraduates. The primary application of EM is to assisting the private thinking-with-the-computer activity of a single modeller. In this context, it is sometimes appropriate to consider the modeller as the sole instigator of state-change, engaged in the way that an experimental scientist or a craftsman is involved with building artefacts that serve a role in advancing personal understanding. Such modelling is typically prior to a clear specification of goals or intended functionality. Other forms of modelling, such as are concerned with understanding the many different varieties of concurrent interaction between agents, are developed in EM within the personal interactive environment constructed by the modeller.

The empublic projects archive is a site containing many of the practical projects constructed for the EM project over the years. The projects can be downloaded from the archive. Some projects run in the EDEN tool, which can be downloaded from the Software pages. Many different potential applications of EM for which proof-of-concept has been established are illustrated in this archive, and some of these are examined in greater detail in postgraduate theses. They include topics such as: human-computer interaction, interactive graphics, computer-aided design, scientific visualisation, concurrent systems modelling, concurrent engineering, business process re-engineering, decision-support and systems development. The project has received sponsorship from the British Broadcasting Corporation, EPSRC, The Royal Society, NSERC Canada, British Telecom, IBM, Matra Datavision and the University of Aizu in Japan to pursue several of these areas of application. The most significant application of EM principles to date has been the development by Richard Cartwright and his colleagues at the BBC R&D laboratories of a prototype publication engine for cross-platform broadcasting. This makes use of the Java Maintainer API he prototyped in his PhD thesis.