This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Coordination Languages and Models, COORDINATION '96, held in Cesena, Italy in April 1996. Over the last few years, a new class of models, formalisms, and mechanisms for describing concurrent and distributed computations has emerged. A characteristic feature of these coordination languages and models is that they are based on (generative) communication via a shared data space. The 21 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 78 submissions; also included are three invited papers and 10 posters. All in all, these papers report the state of the art in this young and active area of research and development.