Artificial skin represents the culmination of inference-centric haptic system design: an engineered embodiment of how hardware, software, and application subsystems cooperate to reproduce the perceptual and functional logic of natural touch. This chapter positions artificial skin as both a technological construct and a systems-engineering case study, illustrating how the integration of sensing, inference, and control transforms tactile surfaces into intelligent perceptual interfaces. Through the focused example of compliance perception, the chapter demonstrates how a high-level system goal can be decomposed into coordinated subsystem requirements grounded in first principles of haptic science. It further generalizes this framework across application contexts—from task-specific inspection to social and healthcare robotics—showing how the same inference-centric pipeline can scale in complexity, adapt to multimodal cognition, and ultimately support embodied intelligence.