This chapter recasts prescription in terms of design. Prescription has been of long-standing interest in logic, rhetoric, and dialectic. However, prescription is often narrowly cast such that it misses how context for argumentation is deliberately constructed. It is argued here that there can be design for argumentative polylogue that is more deliberate than the routine inventiveness evident in ordinary communication. This design work is not simply about particular inventions-for and discoveries-about positions, players, and places for argument but about assembling polylogues to produce particular argumentative discourse. Social media platforms are critically engaged to explore this point and to consider more generally the practical design theorizing involved in constructing argumentative polylogues. Argumentative design is shown to be best understood as an architectonic productive art for producing argumentative discourse that experiments with what is possible, plausible, probable, and preferable for disagreement management. It is work that is organized by a fundamental design question: what disagreement(s) to have (if any)? To further understand the designability of polylogical interaction for argumentative conduct, and the contestability of its design, additional contemporary cases in policy, deliberative democracy, and critical infrastructures are used to articulate communicative imagination, design languages, and critical thinking for polylogical argumentative design.

This chapter formulates the basic problem addressed in this book: how to understand the complexity of argumentation, that is, how argument and communication are entangled in human activity. Polylogue is introduced as a simple yet perspicuous term for renewing and advancing inquiry of argumentation in complex communication. The fact that polylogue cannot be dismissed is evident in examples of managing disagreement under polylogical conditions both contemporary (e.g., social media platforms) and historical (e.g., establishing congressional representation for the newly formed US republic). While recognized in practice, however, polylogue is theoretically dismissed by an analytic strategy of dyadic reduction prominent across time in the study of argumentation and communication. Even the remarkable theoretical and methodological contributions of the twentieth-century revival of the study of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, do not yet make a polylogical turn for understanding argumentation due to lingering commitments to a paradigmatic norm of dyadic interaction. However, much broader considerations of how argument happens stimulated by this revival provide starting points for a polylogical alternative.