What is Design Excellence?
Communities across the country want better public places. What they rarely have is an account of how a place gets that way and stays that way. Columbus, Indiana has been building that account for more than eighty years, in public, on streets and buildings anyone can walk through. This page sets out what we have learned and what we believe transfers.
Design excellence is a civic practice sustained by institutions, habits, and shared expectations about the quality of public life. Columbus has lived this practice for more than eighty years. It demonstrates that disciplined decisions about the built environment shape a community's civic identity, public trust, and long-term prosperity.
The field has plenty of language for what good places look like and almost none for how they come to be. Community rankings measure economic outcomes. Placemaking practice measures activity in place. Neither tells a community whether the decisions it makes today will pay off in the future.
Two assumptions often hold communities back. The first is that design excellence follows money, so a community without wealth should not expect it. The second is that it is tied to elite designers, so a community should just hire a great architect and the rest will follow.
Columbus had money and great architects, and neither explains the results. The Cummins Foundation Architecture Program paid architects' fees, a small share of any project's cost; the city and the schools paid for the buildings as they would have anyway. Public boards chose a designer from the foundation's list and could decline whenever they wanted.
What made the difference was a set of civic habits that emerged over decades of work: a shared definition of quality, institutions that outlasted the people who started them, and a public that expected to see good results. Many communities with more money and more famous architects have less to show for it.
Whether those habits can be built in any community without Columbus's advantages is the question the Indiana Quality of Place Learning Partnership exists to understand.
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Columbus is evidence that this works. The method transfers; the particulars do not.
A model implies replication: take these elements, apply them elsewhere, expect similar results. Columbus's specific conditions are not transferable. Its history, institutions, philanthropy, and civic culture are products of a particular place and time.
What transfers is the method. The habits. The standards. The accountability to long-term public value. The discipline of deciding with rigor and care. Any community can build those. Columbus shows that they hold.
What Columbus learns from other cities matters as much as what it shares. A method that works only in Columbus is not a method. It is a local habit.
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Design excellence is the practice of making decisions about the built environment with rigor, care, and accountability to the long-term public good, so that the places people share are worthy of their use, their trust, and their attachment.
It is civic because it belongs to everyone. Most of the built environment is shared, and decisions about it affect all residents, not only those with the resources to avoid the consequences.
It is a practice because it must be exercised repeatedly, across many decisions, by many people, over long periods. No single building establishes a community standard.
It is a discipline because it requires judgment. It requires reading a place carefully, understanding its history and its future, weighing competing values, and deciding for the whole rather than the few. That capacity can be taught, practiced, shared, and improved.
And because it is a discipline, it can be measured, and we believe measurement belongs inside the practice. It shows communities whether their decisions are producing the conditions they intend.
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It is not a matter of taste. It is not a preference for a style, era, or aesthetic. It is not what happens when enough people agree that something is beautiful. It is not a luxury reserved for wealthy communities, and it is not the exclusive domain of professional designers.
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The argument for design excellence is cultural. It is also economic, and Indiana's numbers are specific.
The 2024 report Embracing a Culture of Creativity: Indiana's Overlooked Economic Engine, commissioned by the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, found that arts and cultural industries make up 2.0 percent of Indiana's gross state product, ranking the state 47th nationally. States with the highest concentrations of arts and culture in their economies pay workers across all industries nearly $22,000 more per year on average.
Indiana's per capita income stood at over 96 percent of the national average in the 1960s. It has fallen to 88 percent. The report argues that investment in arts, culture, and creativity can help close that gap.
The relationship runs in a cycle. Quality of place attracts talent. Talent generates economic activity. Economic activity funds civic institutions. Those investments sustain quality of place. Communities that break the cycle by disinvesting in public space rarely recover it quickly.
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In October 2026 we will convene Prove It: A National Summit on Design Excellence as Civic Practice, with five Indiana cities and a national design faculty. The Prove It Summit requires Columbus to defend its claims in public, alongside practitioners who have done comparable work under different conditions.
Read about the Learning Partnership →
Exhibit Columbus is where we test this in our own city. Over ten years, it has commissioned new work from designers at every stage of their careers, placed it on public streets, and asked residents to live with it and argue about it. Most of the installations come down in three months, but some stay for years. The expectations they raise do not. Learning to measure that difference is the work.
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Civic Design Institute: Defines the discipline and shares the method.
Progressive Preservation: Cares for design excellence over time.
Exhibit Columbus: Tests design excellence in public.
Monumental Gestures: Applies the method in Indianapolis.