This paper examines some of the ways in which university-level foundation studies in architecture and design, which are undertaken as forms of situated praxes, can encourage students to more meaningfully – and more readily – ground their drawn lines of inquiry, their works, and themselves in corporeal presence, attunement, and place. It aims to share some experiments in phenomenologically-based approaches, as possible ways for more commonly interweaving action and analysis, practice and theory. The engagements with these embodied and relational practices are not merely about meaning‐making through the subjectivities the students produce. Rather the practices also include the meaning‐making co‐produced through relations with one another, with the given occasion(s), and the particular place(s). In short, the attempt will be made to demonstrate how a series of body‐centred and place‐oriented drawing practices can help instill forms of embodied criticality and wonder in the students’ own modus operandi. The cases to be discussed will include a series of sketchbook methods, embodied vision workshops, as well as in situ spatial interventions; with each strategy offering different means for probing and contesting the ocularcentrism prevalent in much of architecture and design representations today. The attempt will be made to show how these practices and tools can be seen as significant because they invite students to question and challenge the intensification of experiential blindness in their education and profession(s), whilst also purposefully resisting such dualities as real vs. virtual, analogue vs. digital, etc.