Research efforts in various fields related to Smart life increase constantly. There are very well-established fields like Smart home, Smart city, and Smart grid, and more emergent ones, like Smart farming, Smart university, and Smart tourism. Smart life intends to enhance human life and serves as an umbrella term for all Smart topics. However, the research domain of Smart life is very diverse and multifaceted. Our main goal is to systematize the existing research work around Smart life to provide direction for the development and maintenance of Smart artefacts and applications, thus, to move towards Smart life engineering. To achieve this goal, a mandatory step is to understand and organize all the different Smart topics studied in the scientific literature by means of a systematic mapping study. We analyzed 2341 existing Smart state-of-theart works and research agendas. We propose a taxonomy of Smart applications, study their evolution over time, analyze their venues, specific terminology, and driving factors. The resulting overview is useful to researchers and practitioners to improve the positioning of their work and to identify the research opportunities in all types of smartness for humans, organizations, and society.