Power Tool Sharing

"Live/Work: Designing Services for Sustainability (Or Why You Really Don't Need a New Drill)"
Too often, we've been sold products we don't actually really need -- or at very least, rarely need -- on the presumption that these products will bring us closer to the experiences and relationships we crave. Toolmakers, for instance, advertise power drills as tools for providing for our loved ones' comfort, and thus showing our love for them, winning their approval or having the glow of a job well done (think: any of a number of ads showing a manly guy doing work around the house to the great satisfaction of his beaming wife). But the reality is that most power tools are used for only minutes a year. And, when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want is not the tool itself but the thing we get by using the tool. As my brother puts it, "You want the hole, not the drill." But many of us guys have been taught (largely by advertising) that to be a man is to own tools, so there's something a bit sissifying about belonging to a tool library. That's where Live/Work comes in: they're trying to figure out ways of talking about, for example, sharing tools in such a way that it's obviously cooler and smarter to be a tool-sharer than a tool-owner, whether or not one cares about the environmental benefits. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004887.html