It's 11 A.M., four days into her new gig, and Adaora Udoji is already exhausted. "It sounded like such a good idea a year ago, to get your ass up at midnight," she says, laughing. "But it's for a great cause."

The cause for which Udoji and her cohost, John Hockenberry (both of whom are award-winning TV correspondents), are willing to upend their days is a radio program called The Takeaway. The upstart morning show is not only an audacious bid to take on NPR's Morning Edition, whose 12.9 million listeners make it the second-most-popular radio show in the country, after Rush Limbaugh's, but it is also an effort to tackle the challenge that keeps public-radio programmers up at night: how to engage with an audience that's migrating to cell-phone headlines and podcasts for its news.

To equip the show for this fight, Takeaway producers sought a secret weapon 3,000 miles away: Stanford University's d.school. "Design thinking can be applied to all nature of challenges," says George Kembel, the d.school's director. Kembel saw the opportunity to test his methods on something new--a media product--and the producers got tools that could help them come up with fresh ideas.

The first goal was to create a public-radio news program that replaces highly produced, carefully edited segments, such as those on Morning Edition, with something that feels a little more on the fly--open and conversational. New York's WNYC, which coproduces the show with Public Radio International (PRI), its distributor, drew its inspiration from the BBC Radio's popular 5 Live, a highly interactive alternative news broadcast in the U.K.

But executing on that concept began with a trip to California. In June 2007, 15 producers and executives from WNYC and PRI met with Kembel and d.school instructors in a ring of red sofas on the platform at Palo Alto's Caltrain station, a nod to the school's "user-centered experience" ethos. "The exercise got us thinking about how to remake mornings," says John Keefe, WNYC's news director. "So we're sitting at the train station during the morning commute, and all these people are rushing past. It was this beautiful moment." Not everyone was so blissed out at going back to school. "As a bunch of cynical New Yorkers, we thought, 'Oh, this is going to be great. How much humiliation are we in for?'" admits Dean Cappello, WNYC's chief creative officer.

A three-day crash course taught the producers the basic steps of d.school innovation: observe, brainstorm, prototype, and implement; repeat as necessary. When they went back to Manhattan, everything was up for debate. Instead of hiring from the usual pool of public-radio producers, they sifted through 1,700 résumés collected from such eclectic sources as Craigslist and the Native American Journalist Association. The usual media brainstorming sessions also shifted. "Here's how idea meetings work in TV news: 'We did that, I saw that, I hate that!'" Hockenberry says, his voice rising. Instead, following the design firm Ideo's guidelines, the team encouraged wild ideas while deferring judgment.The result of all that foment debuted at the end of April. The program's central idea is a daily question that audiences are asked to riff upon, either by calling in or by emailing. Their responses are then woven into the rest of the show's programming. Notes executive producer Graham Griffith: "Our hope is that pretty soon The Takeaway will be not just a radio program but an active environment."