Emma Canton is an Italian designer based in Geneva. Her work explores the intersection of interior architecture, installation, product, and stage design, with a particular focus on temporary structures and public space. She investigates how spatial practices can reflect and reshape social and cultural dynamics, drawing on a multidisciplinary approach that combines technical precision with critical inquiry.
Emma began her education in product design before earning a bachelor’s degree in Interior Design at IUAV in Venice. She then pursued the Master of Arts in Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève. Throughout her studies, she deepened her expertise through various professional experiences in architecture and interior design studios in both Italy and Switzerland. In 2019, she was awarded first prize at the Oltredesign competition during the Treviso Design Contest in Italy. Projects developed within the MAIA program were exhibited at MMMAD in Madrid and BAAP in Versailles, and have been published on platforms such as Divisare. Her master’s thesis, Re-coding Space: How Protest Redefines Urban Environments Through Objects and Action, is published on SONAR.
Diploma Project
Fragility and Power: The Architecture of Protest
At a time when public space is in constant negotiation, Fragility and Power: The Architecture of Protest emerges as a platform for collective action—an open-source library to be accessed, downloaded, and activated by communities reclaiming urban space through protest. Here, protest becomes a form of urban design, where political needs take shape through spatial tools, strategic maps, and shared protocols.
Each element responds to its geographical and socio-political context, showing how protest temporarily reshapes the city. Through design, protest becomes choreography, language, ephemeral infrastructure: a collective act that creates space, relationships, and memory. The structures it proposes are replicable and agile—resistance strategies born within conflict, capable of challenging repressive norms, protecting bodies, and disrupting the order imposed in public space.
These are not permanent constructions, but mobile situations ready to transform and be continuously rewritten by those who activate them. The architectural structures that emerge embody a form of fragility—not as weakness, but as a condition of resistance. It is a fragility rooted in time, in transience, but also in trust and cooperation: a relational, collective structure sustained by the shared act of resistance.
Precisely because of their impermanence and openness, these forms are more difficult to control or dismantle; their very lightness prolongs their presence and complicates repression. Fragility here becomes a strategy—a way to evade, to persist, to adapt. In an era when political actions urgently claim space, design goes beyond simply shaping forms; it becomes a device that activates processes, offers tools, and opens possibilities.
