Driven by a critique of Ishii et al’s recent vision of Radical Atoms we call for a debate on the different conceptual paradigms underlying the TEI community and its activities. TEI was initiated to share and connect different perspectives, but we feel conceptual debate is lacking. To fuel this debate, we start with comparing two paradigms by examining the Radical Atoms proposal and balance it from our design-led perspective. Our aim with this paper is to revive the richness of TEI’s multidisciplinary approach.