Starting with some general and historical perspective, mechatronics is placed in the technological field map as a multidisciplinary discipline. The considered advantages of mechatronic systems are exposed from the human perspective, which enables the consideration of the social impact of this technological discipline. Due to the multidisciplinary character of mechatronics, the integration issues including synergetic effects consider both geometrical and functional aspects. The same reason provides a very large variety of different solutions to fulfill a certain functionality. Choosing an appropriate solution for a specific application is done using systematic methods which shape this problem to an optimization problem. General statements are illustrated with different application examples.