Smart artifacts are a new breed of computational artifacts that became pervasive in people's lives as embedded or stand-alone devices. It has been proven by engineers and developers that computational artifacts can be autonomous, adaptive and may achieve goals while maintaining their performance under changing conditions. But the question about how should they be designed in order to facilitate social interaction among people is still open.

A social interaction requires more than just the intention of one of the interacting parties to affect the other. In order to interact, it is necessary that the involved parties exhibit some sense of reciprocity, coordination and mutuality. Artifacts (tools or technologies) are mediators of these aspects of social interaction, and the research in the lab explores the idea of designing smart artifacts that take part in the cooperation and collaboration among people by performing adaptive actions.

The mediating role of a smart artifact within an activity consists of reading the actions of subscribed actors, processing and interpreting those readings based on the dominant moral principles, and signaling suggestions or enabling affordances that promote interaction between actors. This raises two fundamental questions about the design of such artifacts. How smart artifact performative actions can effectively signify an ongoing social situation, and to what extent actors' interactions within an activity are improved by the acting of smart artifacts?

Based on our findings, the Design for Social Viscosity Lab proposes a framework for the design of smart artifacts that mediate social activities. The framework consists of three main components: a model of the social activity, a model of the smart artifact, and a model of the interaction between the smart artifact and the social activity. The model of the social interactions based on Actor-Network Theory, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding the social nature of human activities. The model of the smart artifact is based on the principles of the Internet of Things, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding the technical nature of smart artifacts. The model of the interaction between the smart artifact and the social activity is based on the principles of Human-Computer Interaction, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding the interaction between humans and computers.