The design, development and maintenance of multi-component software systems often suffer from the lack of suitable coordination abstractions. The aim of this paper is to show the benefits of coordination models based on global communication abstractions whose behaviour is not fixed, but is extensible so as to accomplish the intended behaviour of the whole system. Accordingly, we propose the notion of programmable coordination medium as an abstraction provided by the coordination model around which the global behaviour of a coordination architecture can be designed. As an example, we show how a Linda-based approach can be empowered by exploiting the notion of programmable tuple space, as supported by the ACLT coordination model.