Current trends in development of components, structures, and systems place unprecedented requirements on their designers. To satisfy these demands, new, highly efficient materials and structural designs are being employed and integrated utilization of the most sophisticated technologies is being made. This paper addresses some of the pertinent issues relating to this integration and explores how to take advantage of the analytical, computational, and experimental solution methodologies in relation to a given problem. More specifically, a hybrid approach to deformation analysis is described, based on recent developments in merging, or unifying, of the finite element method with experimental methodologies, and especially with optical metrology. This approach emphasizes the analogy between the methodologies used and employs them to obtain solutions that may not have been otherwise obtainable, to ease the existing solution procedures, or to attain improvements in the results. The paper begins with an introduction to the methodologies used, continues with a discussion of the analytical fundamentals, and concludes with a presentation of representative results.