A HUGE Designing Tomorrow Update

In this bonus episode, we're kicking off Season 2 with a new co-host, Jonathan Hicken. 

Learn about Jonathan’s path to social impact, from being raised by peace corps parents in Venezuela to his current role as Executive Director at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, a marine science museum. 

You can also learn a bit more about Eric's journey from design school dropout to accidental entrepreneur and what sparked his decision to focus his work at Cosmic fiercely on social impact. 

Jonathan and Eric cover a lot of ground in this season, and we can’t wait to get future episodes out into the wild soon. 

Episode Highlights 

[00:22] - Introduction of Jonathan Hicken as the new co-host for Season 2.

[00:48] - Jonathan shares his background in social impact, from Peace Corps parents to leading nonprofit initiatives.

[02:01] - Eric and Jonathan discuss their past collaboration on a successful digital transformation project.

[04:01] - Eric reflects on his journey from a design school dropout to a leader in social impact.

[08:22] - Eric and Jonathan outline the mission of "Design Tomorrow" and the questions they'll explore in the new season.

Quotes

"I’m really excited to have someone to represent the practitioner seat and to talk about how these ideas can be translated within an organization." - Eric Ressler [03:23]

"My success in running Cosmic is just straight luck of being in the right place at the right time with a skill set that was highly in demand." - Eric Ressler [05:21]

"I’m a big fan of the way you think about social impact work, and I’m excited to channel that energy into our conversations." - Jonathan Hicken [03:10]

Resources

• Designing Tomorrow Podcast Season 1
• Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Transcript

Eric Ressler [00:04]:

I'm Eric Ressler.

Jonathan Hicken [00:05]:

I'm Jonathan Hicken,

Eric Ressler [00:06]:

And this is Designing Tomorrow. 

Welcome everyone to season two of Design tomorrow. Today is a big day because we have a special announcement. If you're watching, you can already see this, but if you're listening, I want to introduce you to Jonathan Hicken. Jonathan, thanks for joining.

Jonathan Hicken [00:36]:

I'm so excited to be here. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Ressler [00:38]:

So Jonathan is our new co-host for season two. And Jonathan, I'd love if you could start by just introducing yourself and telling our listeners a little bit about your path to social impact.

Jonathan Hicken [00:48]:

Sure. So social impact is kind of in my blood. I was born to social impact, basically Peace Corps parents in Venezuela. So I was born in Venezuela. We moved around a bit growing up. I actually lived in Mexico before going to college. 

So this has been in my life, my entire upbringing. And when I began my career, I thought I was going to go into academia. So I studied undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States and learned that traditional academia was not going to be for me. So I took a hard right turn and joined a startup, a small startup, kind of a classic story because I wanted to learn how to build a business and I wanted to learn how to take care of customers and ended up learning how to do marketing and sales and all these really important skills. 

And it was at that point that I met this really inspiring leader named Nina Simon, who was running the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. And I decided to join her. I was inspired by what she was doing and the way she was thinking about public spaces and doing community work. And so I've been in that space ever since. 

I've been in the social impact, specifically the nonprofit space ever since, mostly doing fundraising and marketing. And about three years ago I became the executive director of a small science museum and aquarium in Santa Cruz.

Eric Ressler [02:01]:

And so our stories intersect at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art History where you led a project with Cosmic and you were on the museum side. Obviously I was on the Cosmic side, and it was largely a website overhaul project, but really kind of a digital transformation project. 

And I remember, I still think fondly back on that project because it was such a success from all measures, but largely just the experience of working with you and your team. And I think that kind of sparked just a real connection between us individually. I think what kind of furthered that spark was, we both had our first kids at the same time, literally three days apart, and both transitioned into parenthood and fatherhood at the same time. 

And we've really since then kind of just stayed in touch, become friends. We have dinners where we talk shop and go deep with raw conversations about social impact.

[02:54]:

One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on as a co-host is because I think we can channel that same in our dinner discussions, maybe tone down just a bit and hopefully share some of the learnings and the kind of experience that we have and the discussions that we have around social impact with our listeners. 

I'm also really excited because I don't have that practitioner experience that you have that lived experience of being in-house at a social impact organization. I've always been on the outside, so to speak. So I am really excited to have someone to represent the practitioner seat and to kind of talk about how these ideas can be translated and actually integrated and embodied within an organization. And

Jonathan Hicken [03:32]:

Look, I'm really a believer in the way that you think about social impact work and the way you channel that through Cosmic and the clients you work with around the country and around the world. I'm a big fan, I'm a believer. I try to practice it in my day-to-day. And actually as a listener of season one, it was fun for me to sort of gut check what you were saying with the realities of being an executive director. And so I'm hoping that we can have some juicy conversations like that.

Eric Ressler [03:56]:

And I should also mention that Jonathan was a huge influence on season one. I sent Jonathan some really early test recordings of some of our episodes, and he had some harsh but valid criticisms that really helped elevate and just bring the show to the next level. So you are already part of the show behind the scenes, and now you're just coming out a little bit more front and center. 

Jonathan Hicken [04:18]:

As a listener and fan of season one, it occurred to me that we actually never got your introduction and your story. What's your story, Eric?

Eric Ressler [04:26]:

Yeah, I've been running Cosmic for coming up on almost 15 years at this point. Really, I would describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur. I did not expect to start a company. I was just doing design work. 

My background is in design, and I joined a coworking space in Santa Cruz, and this was kind of coming out of the great recession around 2009, 2010, and found myself really highly networked with a lot of people who were starting new ventures, new businesses, new startups, and who needed design work. 

So I think so much of, frankly, my success in running Cosmic is just straight luck of being in the right place at the right time and having, developing a skill set that was really highly in demand for people starting new businesses. I learned a lot just through doing that work, cutting my teeth, learning based on experience. That's how I learn.

[05:22]:

I don't even have a college degree doing this work. I'm a design school dropout. It's just the way that I learn. I don't learn very well in a very structured, kind of course style academic approach either.

 So I'm a kind of hands-on person. I'm a self-taught person. And that experience gave me the opportunity to really learn by doing, and largely in the early days by kind of failing and having to learn by the pain of not doing things well at first, not knowing anything about how to run a business, still just getting my foundational design skills underneath me. 

And so fast forward seven years from that point, I'm running at that time an 11 person agency, but focused on really not much of anything in the sense of we weren't focused on a niche of any kind. We were really just helping people who are in our network.

[06:12]:

And that network largely was B2B startups, B2C startups, early stage companies in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area. And that was great. We learned a lot through doing that. There's some really skilled people in that space, obviously. But at the end of the day, we knew we needed to really focus the agency, and I knew that I wanted a little bit more out of my work life than just helping B2B startups create another dashboard analytics thing or whatever. 

And alongside that work, we'd also done some social impact work, working with nonprofits, working with some social enterprises. And I found that work to be a really fulfilling, and B, I saw a huge need for design and branding and marketing within that space. And this was even going on eight years ago now. I think a lot's changed in the space. 

There's a lot more adoption of brand building and marketing and that being kind of accepted in the space. It's still not even close to where I think it needs to be. And I see the trajectory being good and moving in the right direction there, but it was a combination of like, Hey, I see a need here and I can get behind this. I know my team can get behind it. 

So we decided to put a stake in the ground and really focus strictly on social impact and did it very quickly and have learned a lot in the last eight years doing that. So that's the short slash long story.

Jonathan Hicken [07:36]:

Yeah. Well, look, I'm a big fan and as a social impact practitioner and now leader for a long time I was always kind of hungry for a playbook or a path forward. I had the sense that the industry, the field was getting stale, had some problems, and here comes Eric, and here comes Cosmic with this whole set of not just ideas like head in the Sky ideas, but real ways of playing out this work in a new way, in a new way that meet meets the air of the 2020s and beyond. So I'm really excited to hear some of the thoughts that are going through your head and share what I'm seeing on Boots on the ground way. 

Eric Ressler [08:15]:

Yeah, likewise. And I think maybe we should take just a minute to talk about and maybe just kind of reintroduce the show to listeners. So the reason we really started the show is because it was really kind of trying to scratch our own itch in one way or another. We really want to look at what is the difference between social impact organizations that thrive? 

And we all have examples in our head around what some of those organizations are and who some of those organizations are. But what's the difference between those organizations and so many other social impact organizations who are struggling to get traction, struggling to make a meaningful impact, struggling to grow their organization to the degree that it needs to grow in order to really reach their mission and their true impact potential? And there's no one easy answer to that, right? Which is why we can build a whole show around that question.

[09:03]:

The show is really meant for social impact marketers and leaders, but really anyone who wants to come along and explore that question with us. And so that's what we're going to do in season two and beyond. We have a whole set of really interesting questions that we've prepped for this season, and really I'm just excited to have you along the ride. 

Jonathan Hicken:

I'm excited to be here, Eric. Let's do it. 

Eric Ressler:

Thanks for joining. We will be dropping our first official episode of season two next week. So everyone stay tuned and excited to have you join us.