After obtaining a Masters degree in Visual Communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, Ashwini co-founded Elephant, India's largest independent integrated design consultancy since 1989.

Ashwini is part of the core group that steers the Design Alliance Asia consortium. She is an active founding member of Association of Designers of India and The Collective, an initiative by women creative leaders to create safe work-places. She is advisor to Indian Creative Women that promotes diversity.  

She has done award-winning work for global brands in automobile, engineering, FMCG, food service, healthcare & personal care segments. Some of the awards include Global ReBrand 100 (USA), Worldstar for Packaging Excellence (Germany), Asiastar for Packaging Excellence (Singapore), A’Design Awards (Italy), Lexus Design Awards and India Design Excellence Awards among many others.  

Ashwini was invited by Rockefeller Foundation to participate in a global Social Impact summit and by Danish Design Foundation to partner with Copenhagen Co-creation Agenda. She has lectured across more than 20 countries including AIGA conference in Boston, icograda Design week in Vancouver & Istanbul, Business of Design week in Hong Kong and International Design Congress at Mexico as well as South Korea. More recently Ashwini was a keynote speaker at the Golden Drum International Festival of Creativity in Slovenia.

She has been a jury chair at D&AD (UK), MADstars (S Korea), London International Awards & Golden Drum Awards (Slovenia). She was a jury member at Cannes Lions (France), Global ReBrand 100 (USA), New York Festival Advertising Awards, The One Show Awards (USA), Pentawards (UK), Spikes Asia (Singapore), Design for Asia (HK), International A’Design Awards (Italy) among other prestigious awards in India such as Kyoorius & Abbys. 

As a key member of The Design Alliance Asia consortium, she has edited Colours of Asia book that was published in Hong Kong. This project was awarded Design for Asia Special Culture Award by the Hong Kong government.

To create local awareness on design, Ashwini wrote “Design Purpose”, a bimonthly column in the most widely circulated Sakal newspaper. She has authored over a 100 published articles across local, national & international media. 

Impact Magazine has featured Ashwini among 50 Most Influential Women in Media for seven consecutive years. She is on Campaign India’s A-List.  

Ashwini is a part of the MCCIA committee on Sports, Media & Entertainment. She mentors start-ups through the TiE - The Indus Entrepreneurs platform. She is part of several educational advisory boards of Design Masters Programmes including Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Pune University, World University of Design, Pearl Academy, Nirma University, Symbiosis University and FLAME University.