From the figure it is clear that a project of design thinking is characterized by four different phases that in chronological order are: understanding, abstraction, ideation and solution. It is important to emphasize that the time for which a given project focuses in each of these phases and the order in which it goes through them varies depending on the specific project and persons, which are the design thinkers who work on it.
But we must not forget what has been said about the constraints, and here we refer to deadlines, and their ability to stimulate the creative process. Depending on the case it can be therefore necessary to fix deadlines that delimit the end of a phase and the beginning of the next. It is even more important to emphasize that the process of Design Thinking is not a linear process of innovation. In fact, by virtue of its nature of human-centered design, it is comparable to a iterative process of exploration in which there can be discoveries and changes "on the run" at any moment.