Guided by the notion of design research we develop a learning activity for 12 year old students, who are asked to coordinate themselves physically in terms of distances with respect to two given points in an outdoor setting. The outdoor activity, as well as its continuation into the mathematics classroom, involves mobile software applica-tions specifically developed to support this activity. In this paper, we argue that the design of innovative learning activities is enhanced by the coordination of expertise and knowledge from several research domains, whose collaboration is facilitated by using affordances for representation and communication as design instruments. We present a case where ancient Greek mathematics, modern psychology and techno-logical affordances guide the design of an innovative spatial coordination activity.