While awareness of utility and amenity goals, objectives, and means is useful in itself, it is also worth noting that some treatment methods seem to more effectively combine utility and amenity than others. Conveyance, for example, is easily used to create amenity by exposing stormwater in troughs, runnels, flumes, and waterfalls.  However, while conveyance is an important facet of all treatment systems (because we need to move water from one point to another), it is not actually a BMP as it does not address rate, volume, frequency, duration, or quality. Conveyance can certainly create awareness of stormwater; but it does not directly educate about environmental issues or treatment potential.

Artful rainwater designs will be considered and implemented more often and with greater success in communities where there is a robust understanding of stormwater issues and associated water quality benefits. Stormwater management and design is now an essential component of almost every land planning and site design project. Although the public often believes that water pollution problems come from industrial effluents, in many areas, up to 70% of the pollution in the streams, lakes, and rivers actually comes from non-point sources such as urban runoff. The effective placement, use and maintenance of rainwater designs often require public participation and acceptance. However, public acceptance is not always present. Community acceptance of rainwater design is often slower than the process of developing new rainwater regulations; however, it has been shown that innovative rainwater design can be much more easily integrated in communities with existing watershed and stormwater protection programs.

People want to see, touch and play with water especially in urban environments on hot summer days. This concept is reflected in the works of Herbert Dreiseitl where water design invites children and adults to interact and play with water and water systems. On the other hand, most traditional stormwater management systems are intended to keep people away from and out of the water in response to liability fears. Yet, rainwater design can be created in ways that foster interaction with water without creating safety concerns by simply splitting runoff into gentile and shallow small flows and diverting the large flows away to safe locations.  Such systems also allow the first flush to be easily diverted into infiltration and evapotranspiration facilities which more closely recreate the natural hydrological site processes.

Rain falls on the impervious surfaces of developed land, and can be conveyed away from those surfaces in various ways.  It is one thing to divert the stormwater to underground pipes and concrete vaults, disposing of the water as an unwanted waste product—out of sight, out of mind, it is eventually discharged into a water body with high probability of degrading the quality of that new water host.  It is another thing to address stormwater in environmentally responsible ways, through best management practices that pay cautious attention to rate, volume, frequency, duration, and quality of discharge so as to ensure the ecological health of the stormwater destination.  And it is another thing again to employ environmental treatments in expressive designs that call attention to the use and management of stormwater in ways that educate and delight those who visit.