Costa Rican AI product designer and design engineer Carlos Lastres, based in Tokyo, published an essay on October 10, 2026 titled “What a Design Engineer Is in Tokyo, and Why There Are So Few.” The piece examines the role and its limited presence in the city.
The essay is accessible in English at lastres.ai/blog/design-engineer-tokyo, with a Japanese version hosted on the same site. Lastres uses the article to outline his observations on factors contributing to the scarcity of design engineers within Tokyo’s tech ecosystem.
