Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism, and the author of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (1989/2014), Small Spaces (1993), The Japanese Dream House (2001), The Very Small Home (2005), and Just Enough: Lessons in living green from traditional Japan (2010). He is on the Sculpture Faculty at Musashino Art University. Azby is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization devoted to developing new technology platforms for crowdsourced environmental monitoring, promoting open-source and open data principles, initiated by Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster in March 2011. He has lived in Japan since 1985.