Innovation is key to enhancing product performance and customer benefits, with designers having a core role in conceiving and actioning innovations in response to evolving conditions of use and customer needs. This paper discusses the scope for innovation in jockey's safety vests in relation to the constraint of official product standards. The Australian standard for jockey's safety vests, ARB 1.1998, has not been appreciably updated since the early 2000s despite a consistent rate of serious injuries to jockeys, grown in the number of females and the rise of smart wearable technologies in other sports and health. For this product category, those setting standards seem habitually unable to revise their norms, limiting product development to styling. We complete the paper with a snapshot of results from a program of user research, which shows how jockey's needs and perspectives contest the existing standards for safety vests and could significantly inform product innovation.

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.

While the term “safety vests” has been used to capture these products to reduce the potential for harm in jockeys under the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) umbrella, much of the research in this area has focused on factors typically echoing health, well-being, physiological and cognitive function, and performance of horse riders with very little work about examining how its design may reduce the severity of jockeys' injuries. Due to the recent advances in technology and wearable sensors, the author considered a qualitative study focusing on the analysis of a real-life example involving end and co-dependent users in the design development of jockeys' safety vests. This little article offers an overview of the most popular jockeys' injuries, why there is a need for better protection, and also describes how data were collected and present a summary of the key findings to encourage future research in this field, aiming to create a new prototype. High-impact sports may potentially create severe injuries or deaths to athletes: thus, there is a strong faith in the application of wearable sensor data and data science to also enhance jockeys' safety vest performance.