About Madison Avenue Designs
Built from inside the work.
Madison Avenue Designs is a civic workflow modernization and governed AI consulting practice founded by Eastman Johnson.
The firm’s purpose is practical: help public agencies with limited capacity understand and improve the systems of work that planning staff carry every day.
Founder & Principal Consultant
Eastman Johnson
Municipal planner · workflow strategist · civic product developer
Eastman’s differentiation is the ability to understand both the institutional workflow and the technology and product decisions around it.
He currently works in municipal planning with the City of Columbus, where his practice is grounded in zoning review, land-use analysis, planning workflows, and the documentation and coordination that civic decisions require. This current agency experience keeps his consulting perspective connected to the day-to-day realities of public-sector planning work.
Eastman previously worked within the Bluegrass Area Development District, a regional quasi-governmental organization serving 15 county clients across central Kentucky. That experience provided direct exposure to rural jurisdictions, shared planning capacity, lean departments, and regional support models. These contexts are too often overlooked in modernization strategies designed around larger agencies.
A wider civic perspective
Local operations in a larger institutional context.
Eastman’s Peace Corps and Fulbright experience in Morocco expanded his understanding of civic institutions, community context, communication, and development across cultures.
His community and nonprofit work, including founding and development experience with Resilient Communities, reinforces the importance of building capacity with people, not simply delivering a recommendation to them.
Education, leadership, and product practice
From ambiguous problem to implementable decision.
Eastman holds a Master of Community Planning, a Bachelor of Urban Planning, and a Graduate Certificate in Urban Design from the University of Cincinnati. He is also an MBA candidate focused on organizational leadership.
That academic foundation adds planning depth, systems thinking, and an operating and change-management lens to modernization work. As the founder and developer of CivicLink, Eastman also works hands-on to translate zoning and land-use processes into product requirements, modular workflows, deterministic rules, bounded AI tasks, evidence expectations, human-review controls, and evaluation criteria.
This combination makes it possible to bridge conversations that are often separated: what staff actually do, what leadership needs to decide, what technology must support, and what governance requires.
The firm’s position
Modernization should preserve what public work depends on.
Staff judgment is not a workflow defect. Institutional knowledge is not a dataset waiting to be extracted. Accountability is not an implementation detail.
Madison Avenue Designs helps agencies reduce avoidable friction while protecting the human authority, local knowledge, evidence, and procedural responsibility that legitimate public decisions require.
A grounded conversation about the work