Here are three responses to your question: 1) It's not always true that users lack insight or imagination into new possibilities. Many of our best futurists ar

Here are three responses to your question: 1) It's not always true that users lack insight or imagination into new possibilities. Many of our best futurists aren't technologists - Gene Roddenberry, for example. On the opposite side, programmers can sometimes be resistant to new ideas because they judge the effort to be too high for the benefit. This would be the equivalent something like "If you ask engineers, they'll tell you to buy a faster horse because internal combustion engines are expensive, hard to build and horses are faster anyway (at the beginning they were anyway)." What this misses is that speed isn't the key benefit. If you talked to users, you'd probably discover their needs are lower maintenance costs and improving reliability. Users didn't want to go faster, they wanted to get rid of the horse. 2) UCD is not about asking users to invent new ideas, architect the system or tell us how to implement it (i.e. do you want a horse or an engine?). It's about including the users' perspective in how we assess the benefits and drawbacks of a technology. Engineers tend to want to do this by quantifying aspects of the technical system (megahertz, megapixels, MTBF, softer measures like code quality), excluding a broader perspective of the socio-technical system—the system in a social, human context of use. 3) Developers are often resistant to including the users in the design process because they feel that it impinges on their autonomy, especially when it interferes with their desire to innovate. There's a little bit of... well, hypocrisy is maybe too strong a word, so let's say inconsistency in this. Developers defend their own autonomy and right to direct their own work, and rightly so. But they then argue that it should be taken away (or at least not given) to the users of the technologies they build, technologies which deeply affect the work and lives of those users. As I argue in the article, excluding users has a negative impact on developer autonomy, because UX designers are brought in, reducing and sometimes eliminating developer control, except for the most talented and insightful.