Creating the tricorder brought up many issues of how to accurately represent
data in intuitive ways. While there are numerous inputs (touch,
distance, light, temperature) and outputs (pager motor, speech synthesis,
beeping), there are no obvious mappings to be made between them.
This becomes even more complex when one realizes that two of the
outputs use the same sensory modality - sound. Managing to represent
the myriad of sensors into two modes of sensory output (auditory and
tactile) required reflection and manipulation of the data.