The demand to satisfy environmental and economic performance requirements of buildings highlights the application of the responsive skin facades in offering superior performance, as compared to conventional façades. With this respect, responsive skins have become a growing field of research during the recent decade while a thorough review of studies investigating their design and technology aspects is still missing. To fill the identified gap, this study aims to present a systematic literature review and state of the art in an untouched research area of the responsive skins, integrated with their geometric and mechanism design approaches. To this end, a total of 89 studies, collected from two major bibliographic databases of Scopus and Google Scholar from the first of 2010 to the mid of 2021, were reviewed and several classifications and analyses on the associated design thinking, skin systems and responsive mechanisms were presented. The gap analysis of the findings indicates that the lack of controllable substitution design for mechanical skins is one of the reasons preventing the application of responsive skins in construction industry. Furthermore, the gap between simulation and constructability and the relationship between the designed skin geometry with climatic analysis and performance provide basis for future studies.