Is it Still Worth Challenging the Status Quo? A Design Process Paper About the Involvement of Co-Dependent Users to Develop Safety Equipment for Horse Riders

Abstract

Jockeys must wear safety vests as a piece of compulsory personal product equipment (PPE) due to the highly dangerous nature of horse racing. Notwithstanding that ‘design thinking’ became popular in various fields (e.g. business, education, health, IT), product innovation still not widely attract its application to the design of some PPE products. This article discusses a qualitative case study about the design of Australian safety vests for jockeys along with the application of user-centred design principles. This led to asking for a revision of this framework to accommodate design dependencies in terms of a suggested dependency-based user experience (D-UX) design framework along with further research in this field.