Motorola’s architects — Gensler — have turned the upper floors of a building that was completed just as the Great Depression’s death grip took hold into a fun, modern, and beautiful place. It goes on forever: the sheer size of the Mart, each of its 18 stone-and-steel main floors, can’t be overstated. Every labyrinthian hallway leads to a room of employees who seem imbued with a sense of purpose (or at least have been told to look convincingly busy for the day of a media tour). In one direction, an enormous room with signal-proof windows houses engineers poring over camera components with microscopes. A few desks over, a staffer pops a circuit board into a shiny red case that could very well be a new smartphone model. Elsewhere, butt machines — my term, not Motorola’s — simulate the effect of sitting on a Moto X over and over and over again. A game room filled with TVs, arcade consoles, and basketball machines sits virtually empty. Everywhere, there’s an air of focus.

Everywhere, there's an air of focus

Wicks and I are seated in the Consumer Experience Design (CXD) lab, a cozy space occupied by a handful of employees wearing navy blue labcoats with throwback Motorola logos from the late ’40s on their backs. Along one wall lies showcase after showcase of prototype phones that have been designed and assembled in the CXD. Some I recognize, others I don’t — unreleased design experiments that died on the vine. Next to the cases, a drawer opens to reveal dozens of unreleased Moto X case designs; my mind starts to wander, thinking about what Moto Maker — the company’s unprecedented built-to-order-smartphone program — could’ve been. On top of the drawer, Wicks is pleased to see that a whimsical table radio he’d designed while at Sony has made it from the Libertyville offices. It looks a bit like an alien with eyes on long, thin stalks.

This is a particularly important place among the new headquarters’ many spaces and corridors. It’s the incubator for Motorola’s next-generation products, a critical source of ideas — money-making ideas — and the means to execute on them. Mike Jahnke, a bespectacled CXD manager with an awesome bow tie, tells me a story of how he’d made a custom RAZR in pink and had it sent to tennis superstar Maria Sharapova. She happened to use it on television (unscripted, he says), prompting a call to Jahnke from then-CEO Ed Zander. "Did you make that phone?" It wasn’t long afterward that Zander and team signed off on a production run of pink RAZRs, which ended up being a massive seller.

But it’s the large room adjacent, the model shop, that has Wicks most animated. Row after row of rapid prototyping machines — industrial-strength 3D printers, mostly — spit out ideas practically in real time as they pop into engineers’ heads. That kind of rapid turnaround is of particular importance for a product like the Moto 360, Motorola’s hotly anticipated Android Wear smartwatch, which is locked in for a summer launch and could be the most attractive and functional device yet in the nascent wearables market. Time is of the essence now, and there still seems to be quite a bit of work to do. "The ability to go broad fast and get to something that will completely mimic what that product is going to be at the end is hugely important and often overlooked," he says. "Prototyping is something that needs to be completely woven into the fabric of how you create strategies and products. It's not an outsource thing, so we see it as an integral part of our business and a great part of how we design now."