Duckyfarm Studio is a creative studio that develops original characters, illustrated stories, books, and thoughtfully designed keepsakes for children and families. Through storytelling, illustration, and playful world-building, the studio creates warm, imaginative experiences centered on kindness, curiosity, friendship, and everyday joy.

01. Why I Started Duckyfarm Studio

I started Duckyfarm Studio as a way to make more room for creativity in my life. Much of my work has focused on research, health, technology, and community, but I have always been drawn to storytelling, illustration, and the small ideas that can become something meaningful when they are given space to grow. Duckyfarm became a place where I could explore that side of myself more freely.

I also wanted to create stories that could be shared across generations. Some of the values that matter most to me, kindness, curiosity, friendship, empathy, and caring for others, are often passed down through simple stories and everyday moments. I wanted to bring those values to life through characters and experiences that children and families could enjoy together.

In many ways, Duckyfarm reflects the same questions that run through the rest of my work: how do we help people connect, learn from one another, and carry meaningful values forward? Here, I explore those questions through creativity, storytelling, and imagination.

02. What I’m Doing

Through Duckyfarm Studio, I’m building a small storytelling world around Cara, her family, and the animals who are part of everyday life on the farm. The stories are not only about adventures. I’m especially interested in the small and loving moments between generations. Cara learning something from her grandparents, spending time with her parents, helping a friend, caring for an animal, or simply noticing something meaningful in an ordinary day.

Through books, illustrated stories, products, and keepsakes, I’m exploring how these moments can carry forward values we treasure: kindness, empathy, gratitude, curiosity, friendship, family, and caring for one another. I’m also thinking about how Duckyfarm can tell smaller stories through social media. A story does not always need many pages. Sometimes a short scene between Cara and her grandmother, a quiet conversation with her father, or a simple act of kindness can say something worth remembering.

For me, Duckyfarm is about creating space for the kinds of moments and values that can easily get lost in the pace of everyday life. Through storytelling, illustration, and character development, I hope to make those moments visible again and create stories that children, parents, and grandparents can enjoy and share together.

Through Duckyfarm Studio, I am learning that creativity needs space, attention, and intention. I started Duckyfarm as a way to make more room in my life for storytelling, illustration, and imagination, but it has gradually become something more. It is helping me understand how creativity can connect with many of the same questions that have shaped my work in health, technology, research, and community.

One thing I am learning is that meaningful stories do not always need big events. Sometimes the most important moments are small ones: a child learning something from a grandparent, helping a friend, caring for an animal, asking a parent a question, or simply noticing something in an ordinary day. These moments can easily disappear in the pace of everyday life, but storytelling gives us a way to pay attention to them again.

I am also learning that values such as kindness, empathy, curiosity, gratitude, friendship, and caring for others are often passed on through relationships rather than explanations. Children may learn these values by watching how someone responds, helps, listens, or cares. This has made me increasingly interested in intergenerational relationships and in how meaningful ideas, habits, memories, and ways of treating others travel from grandparents to parents to children.

Duckyfarm is also teaching me how one simple story can have different meanings for different generations. A child might enjoy Cara spending an afternoon with her grandmother, while a parent may recognize a lesson about patience or connection, and a grandparent may be reminded of experiences from their own family.

As I continue developing Cara, her family, the animals, and the world around them, I am learning not only how to tell individual stories, but how to build a world with relationships, routines, places, and memories that feel connected.

Most importantly, Duckyfarm is helping me explore a question that appears throughout much of my work: what is worth carrying forward? Through creativity and storytelling, I am learning how small moments can help preserve the values, relationships, and ways of caring for one another that I do not want us to lose.

Duckyfarm Studio is growing into an intergenerational storytelling world centered on the small, meaningful moments that often shape how we understand care, connection, and family. Through Cara, her family, friends, and the animals around them, the stories explore how values such as kindness, curiosity, gratitude, friendship, empathy, and caring for others are expressed in everyday life. Rather than teaching these ideas directly, Duckyfarm brings them to life through simple experiences: a conversation with a grandparent, helping a friend, caring for an animal, noticing something in nature, or sharing time together as a family. These ordinary moments can carry lasting meaning, especially when they are experienced across generations.

Over time, Duckyfarm can grow beyond individual books into a broader creative world made up of illustrated stories, short scenes, social content, keepsakes, and other experiences that families can return to and share together. The goal is to create something that children can enjoy for its warmth, characters, and imagination, while parents and grandparents may also recognize deeper themes of memory, relationships, values, and what we choose to pass forward. In this way, Duckyfarm Studio can become more than a collection of stories; it can become a place where different generations find something to enjoy, remember, discuss, and perhaps carry into their own everyday lives.