The title Rhetoric and the Arts of Design may suggest that this book attempts to integrate rhetoric and the visual design arts into a conceptual whole, but that's not its intention. Instead, using design in the sense used by architects and engineers, Kaufer and Butler build a case for understanding rhetoric as a design art like architecture. What the design arts have in common is that they are primarily productive rather than analytic; they are considered craft-like and heuristical rather than principled and lawfully regular.

Design involves interaction between designer and environment on open-ended problems (as opposed to algorithmic problems, which are closed-ended and separable from the human qualities of those who propose and solve them). The goal of design is to produce an artifact that appears to its audience to be a seamless performance, even though the production involves discrete stages and modules. A rhetorical performance, Kaufer and Butler assert, also has the characteristics of modularity and the goal of seamless performance.

So this book is one of a number of books written over the past couple of decades whose project is to restore rhetoric to a place of prestige. To those who feel passionately that rhetoric is a missing key concept in the intellectual life of the West, this book will be of considerable interest. For those who metaphorically equate rhetoric with lighter-than-air gases, it will be a tough read, but it might demonstrate that rhetoric has intellectual substance. For technical writers looking for ways to explain the importance of what they do to engineers and software designers, the book might provide a conceptual framework and vocabulary.

The authors aim, through their conceptual demonstration, to improve the status not only of rhetoric, but of the productive design arts in general. These, they assert, have always received less attention and prestige in the academy than they deserve. There is a difference between a design art and a practical art, and rhetoric is generally regarded as a merely practical art, as reflected in the handbook tradition. This tendency reduces rhetoric "to something less interesting and challenging than it in fact is."

In its argument for rhetoric-as-design, the book is rather like Aristotle with flowchart software: it's very categorical, but the categories are related by box-and-arrow diagrams. The prose, although written in fairly short and cohesive sentences, usually operates at a fairly abstract level. Where Aristotle uses Homer and contemporary playwrights for occasional illustrations, Kaufer and Butler use the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Like Aristotle's, Kaufer and Butler's rhetoric-as-design appears to function primarily in the agonistic or contest mode: "Let us define rhetoric as the control of events for an audience." That definition pretty well fits research reports, software manuals, and business proposals.