Is It Still Worth Challenging the Status Quo? A Design Process Article With an Example Application to Australian Jockey’s Safety Vests

Abstract

Horse racing is a highly dangerous activity that imposes the compulsory wearing of jockeys’ safety vests. Although “design thinking” has gained popularity in many fields (e.g., business, health, information technology, education), product innovation is still not used widely in the design of some of the personal protective equipment available to jockeys. This article discusses about an Australian design case study on jockeys’ safety vests that used a qualitative research approach along with user experience design principles, which led to consider a revision of this framework to accommodate design dependencies in terms of a suggested dependency-based user experience design framework. Hence, this article calls for further research in this field.