profile / alumni / transportation-design
April 09, 2025
By Solvej Schou

Transportation Design alum Philipp Haban designs with flair at Joby Aviation

ArtCenter’s Transportation Design alumni work for countless global automotive brands. Their ArtCenter education gives them the skills to enter career fields like automotive concept design, interior and exterior automotive design, watercraft design and aircraft design. This story is part of a series on four successful Transportation Design alumni, each with unique creative journeys, who impact their fields in a variety of ways.

Philipp Haban (BS 13) is not only a designer at Santa Cruz-based all-electric aircraft company Joby Aviation, which has partnered with companies including Uber, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic and Toyota. He was part of the elite team that developed the Google X self-driving car, and he has more than 30—30!—patents in the Silicon Valley advanced mobility space. “They’re really blue sky projects,” he says, smiling mysteriously, via Zoom.  

Joby’s eVTOL is an electric air taxi that combines the flexibility of a helicopter —except with six tilt rotors—with the efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft. Haban points out that electric aircraft need to be designed with lightness in mind. “If the vehicle is too heavy, as an electric aircraft, with batteries, it can't really take off or go long distance,” he says. “Everything you design needs to be lightweight. When it comes to performance and producibility, you need to be very mindful with what you design and how you design it.”  

“With Joby, we’re bringing some automotive romance and flair to a very outdated aviation interior and exterior,” says Haban, who is involved with designing both the exterior and interior of the aircraft, including the fuselage—the outer shape of the aircraft—made of carbon fiber. “Lucky for us, we can shape what an electric aircraft looks like.”  

Growing up in a small village in Germany, Haban sketched, drew comics and skateboarded. His mother, an interior designer, fueled his passion for design, and his father was an executive at Mercedes-Benz. When Haban was 20, he moved to Portland, Oregon to live with his dad, who encouraged him to go to ArtCenter. Haban worked as a design intern at Daimler Trucks North America before applying to the Transportation Design program.  

“As a student at ArtCenter, I was interested in a lot of things, not just cars,” he says. He designed a concept snowmobile. He interned at Bang & Olufsen in Denmark. He went to Germany to be a design werkstudent (student part-time employee) at Mercedes-Benz, and was later sent to the brand’s Advanced Design Studio in Italy to be part of a yacht design team. He took advantage of study away and exchange programs such as the INSEAD business school in Singapore. ArtCenter President Karen Hofmann (BS 97 Product Design)—then chair of the College’s Product Design department—inspired Haban’s entrepreneurial drive, as a student, and encouraged him to go to INSEAD. He took multiple ArtCenter courses taught by now Transportation Design Chair Marek Djordjević (BS 91), who he calls “a teacher that really shaped me as a designer.”

While presenting his senior projects as a graduating student at Grad Show, Haban met the head of design at ICON Aircraft, and was offered a job as a designer. When he got the call from Google X, to be part of the visionary team, working in Mountain View and Detroit, to design the Google X self-driving car, he was ready. “We were told that it needed to be safe, approachable, cute, and embody Google values,” he says of the small two-door vehicle. “I think we successfully made that happen.”
 
After, Haban worked as a designer at BMW, and then got a call from Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center to work in Pittsburgh. He went on to work on the then-secretive Uber Elevate program, with the goal of establishing on-demand flying vehicles. Haban then headed design at Moonware, a project that formed out of Uber Elevate, and whose flagship product, HALO, is the world’s first ground traffic control platform powered by AI. While at Moonware, Haban started working at Joby Aviation, which had acquired Uber Elevate.
 
When it comes to advice for current students, Haban says to think outside the box.
 
“Find innovative companies and intern there,” he says. “Do you really need to go the traditional automotive path? Seek out the unknown. Be adventurous. At ArtCenter, you’re paying for an amazing education and the alumni network. Don't be scared to reach out to alumni. They will always welcome you.”