Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Small Spaces (1993), The Japanese Dream House (2001), The Very Small Home (2005), and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (1989/2014). He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown has lived in Japan since 1985.