Nicole Oncina got a master’s in journalism at Colum­bia, but after she graduated, she wound up at IDEO, the global firm of design thinkers founded in Palo Alto, with sun-splashed offices on San Francisco’s Pier 28. Her intense year as a student journalist came in handy this month, however, when her company offered to imagine the future of journalism through the eyes of tomorrow’s consumers. For three weeks, Oncina was part of a team of media-savvy IDEOers who met day and night, scribbled and scrapped ideas, and ultimately produced a five-page simulation (“News Flash from the Future!”) of how we might someday experience the news.

The IDEO way of conceptualizing where the world is headed and how its clients—from HBO and Bloom­berg to Nokia and Levi’s—should respond is famously idiosyncratic. (Check out the YouTube video of Nightline’s report on how the firm would redesign the shopping cart.) During the “insights” phase of the three-part process, the team of six writers, artists, techies, and “other IDEO misfits” (team leader Alex Grishaver’s characterization) hit the ground to interview people on the street, the press, and other insiders. They also brainstormed about how much effort people will put into trawling for news, and pondered questions such as whether The Daily Show helps or shortchanges the public, and how society will fill in the gaps as traditional reporting erodes.

Next: the “synthesis” phase, during which the group spent a week in a “project room” hidden away near IDEO’s San Francisco offices, spinning out different ways to tell the story of their findings. In this photograph, Oncina sketches a scenario in which nonprofit bureaus would provide editing and fact-checking services to citizen journalists. Another idea was to present our readers with a narrative based on the film Crash: four lives intersecting via an interactive news event. “That work lasted for two days, which was about 47 hours too long, given our deadline,” says Grishaver. Then it, too, became what Oncina calls a “sacrificial concept.”

Once IDEO finally set on an approach, the last stage was “expression,” in which the team had to portray the interactive, multidimensional news experience they’d imagined, but using only the rudimentary tools of today’s magazines: photographs, illustrations, and text. IDEO’s vision may or may not come to fruition, but, as the company tells people, its job is to “encourage wild ideas.” Let the conversation begin.

Photograph courtesy of IDEO