Seriously Playful or Playfully Serious?

Creative and visual methods have shown great potential to engender new ideas and (self) understandings in participants in research focused on topics that are hard to address via conventional qualitative methods such as interviews. Through their playful approach, such methods can open a whole new window for researchers to understand participants or research phenomena. However, engaging participants through these methods can be challenging, and the outcome can be more uncertain and unpredictable compared to conventional qualitative methods. Our article introduces three case studies that applied a method drawn from design research, namely cultural probes. By analyzing these cases together, we are able to highlight the strengths, shortcomings, and issues that need careful consideration when probes are applied to an ethnographic research process. We critically reflect on the ideas of playfulness behind the visual and creative approaches and contribute to methodological discussions on playful methods particularly with adult participants. Our findings emphasize the importance of profound understanding of the epistemological background of the method, why playfulness is employed in research, to whom probes are targeted, and how motivation is engendered in participants. Employed without these considerations, playfulness of probes can appear strange and as something that alienates the study participants rather than engages them in sharing their views and ideas.