Everything you need to write about me.
Biographies you can paste, photography you can print, credentials you can check, and the subjects I will go on the record about. If something you need is missing, ask and I will send it the same day.
Media contact
Messages reach me directly and I answer them myself. Interviews in English, Spanish or Japanese. Based in Tokyo, so JST is the easy timezone and early mornings JST work for European deadlines.
Working from your own mail client instead? [email protected]
Quick facts
- Name
- Carlos Lastres
- In Japanese
- カルロス・ラストレス
- Title
- Product designer and engineer
- Based in
- Tokyo, Japan
- Languages
- Spanish, English, Japanese, Chinese
- Award
- Apple Design Award 2025, Inclusivity category, for accessibility work on Speechify
- Speaking
- Three TEDx talks. Spoke at the United Nations.
- Education
- MBA, plus a background in software engineering
- Own products
- Three iOS apps designed, built and published by him: Glimpse Vision AI, AnimaEcho, Ground Control Chat
- Website
- lastres.ai (English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese) and carloslastres.jp (Japanese)
Biographies
Three lengths, written to be used as they are. No approval needed.
Short, 25 words
Carlos Lastres is an Apple Design Award winning product designer and engineer based in Tokyo, who designs, writes the code, and ships the products himself.
Medium, 50 words
Carlos Lastres is a product designer and engineer based in Tokyo. He won an Apple Design Award in 2025 in the Inclusivity category for accessibility work on Speechify. He has spoken on three TEDx stages and at the United Nations, and publishes three iOS apps of his own.
Long, 100 words
Carlos Lastres is a product designer and engineer based in Tokyo, working at the point where design, engineering and business decisions meet. He won an Apple Design Award in 2025 in the Inclusivity category, for accessibility work on Speechify. His work has shipped to millions of users across education, SaaS, Web3, health technology and consumer apps, and he has designed and built three iOS apps of his own. He holds an MBA alongside a software engineering background, speaks Spanish, English, Japanese and Chinese, and has spoken on three TEDx stages and at the United Nations. He writes at lastres.ai.
Photography
Free to use in any coverage of Carlos or his work, in print or online, without asking first. No cropping that removes the face, no colour treatment, no use implying endorsement of a product or organisation. Credit is appreciated but not required.
Formal headshot
Square, 2160 by 2160 pixels, JPEG, suitable for print. Neutral grey background, so it drops onto most layouts without a cutout.
Need landscape, a different setting, or a photograph on stage? Email me and I will send options.
What I will go on the record about
Each of these is a position I have already published and sourced, so you can quote the argument and check the underlying number yourself.
Design has no seat in Japanese management, by Japan's own measurement
METI and the Japan Patent Office surveyed every Japanese manufacturer with more than 100 employees, 25,000 companies, on what made them successful at opening a market. For the domestic market, 0.8% credited design. For the American market, 0.0% did. Seven years after the Design Management Declaration tried to change that, the vocabulary has moved faster than the org charts.
Read the argument
Japan's AI problem is workflow, not adoption
Individual generative AI use in Japan tripled in a year, and Japanese companies over 1,000 employees now report the highest deployment rate of Japan, the United States and Germany. The gap sits on a single survey line: whether the tool is built into a department's work process.
Read the argument
The engineer shortage has a number nobody quotes
METI's projection of a 450,000 IT worker shortfall by 2030 is quoted constantly. The same document says supply and demand balance at 3.54% annual productivity growth. In software, productivity is mostly a question of what you decide not to build.
Read the argument
Accessibility became an export requirement in June 2025
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to anyone placing services on the EU market, wherever they are established, and Japan made reasonable accommodation a legal duty for private businesses in April 2024. I won an Apple Design Award for accessibility work, so this is the subject I am least neutral and best informed on.
Read the argument
Why system replacements are resented by the people who use them
Seven years after the 2025 Digital Cliff, modernisation in Japan has plateaued, and companies themselves do not name legacy systems as their main obstacle. Replacing a system is not the same as replacing the work.
Read the argument
Selected coverage
- AP News, Blending Design, Creativity, and Global Impact from Tokyo. 2025-09, EN.
- Japan Technology Journal, カルロス・ラストレス氏、Apple Design Award（インクルーシビティ部門）を受賞. 2025-10, JA.
- Delfino.cr, Entre el arte, la tecnología y la empatía. 2025-10, ES.
- NCR Noticias, El tico que dejó todo y conquistó Japón. 2025-11, ES.
- Insights Success, Designing With Purpose: How Carlos Lastres Is Changing the Face of AI. 2026-03, EN.
Selected work
Case studies for all of these are at lastres.ai/work/.
- Speechify Designed and built the desktop apps for the largest text to speech product in the world. The accessibility work here is what the Apple Design Award was given for.
- JPYC Brand redesign for the issuer of Japan's first stablecoin registered with the Financial Services Agency.
- FanFever A global CPOP fan platform taken from nothing to 5 million users and $10 million in merchandise.
- Toei Studios Kyoto Rebuilt the official website of one of Japan's most recognisable film studios.
- CryptoKitties One of the first designers on the product that took blockchain applications mainstream.
How to describe me, and how not to
I am one person, not an agency and not a studio with staff. When I say I ship things myself, that is literal: I do the design and I write the code.
The Apple Design Award was given in the Inclusivity category in 2025, for accessibility work on Speechify. It is an award to the app, and I am accurately described as having won it for that work. Please do not write that I won "an Apple award" without the category, because Inclusivity is the part that says what the work was.
I am not a spokesperson for any of my clients. Ask them about their business and me about the design.
Usage
Everything on this page, the text and the photography, may be used in editorial coverage without asking. If you want to check a fact, quote me on something I have not written about, or arrange an interview, use the contact form at the top of this page and it comes straight to me.