Since the end of the last century, the phenomenon of the digital nomads (DNs), that is the possibility to work remotely from any location being free to travel the world while using portable computing technologies and broad Internet connectivity, was analyzed from a social life perspective. Makimoto and Manners (1997), studying digital nomads as early as 1997, envisioned a globalized world in which new technologies, new kinds of work arrangements, and a growing emphasis on entrepreneurial practices would radically change our lives, blurring distinctions between work, leisure, home, and travel. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the perspective of work, expanding hugely the possibility of working remotely. Twenty years later, the digital nomad has evolved from a merely fictional character into a social figure of current work life.

Processes of redefinition of work, already in place in the pre-pandemic era, with the advent of COVID-19, have become widely required (Bonacini et al., 2021), and workers of organizations of different sectors (i.e., tertiary, education, professional services, and public administration) became involved in a new form of flexible work (Marino and Capone, 2021), namely, “smart working.” According to Rapisarda et al. (2021), smart working is based on four fundamental requirements: digital and remote online working (Nature of the work and Technology), a flexible achievement-based performance relationship structure no longer time-based performance (Relationship structure), and a suitable place to carry out one’s work (Logistics), and mainly aims to enhance the efficiency/effectiveness of the services provided and to increase workers’ satisfaction and autonomy (i.e., operating at the preferred time and in the preferred environment). Smart working can be considered an evolution of Telework (also referred to as telecommuting or remote work) which compared to smart working should be carried out on a regular basis and often tied to a certain work location (often their home or telework center; Rymkevich, 2018; Beckel and Fisher, 2022). For employees, smart working is a way to optimize schedules, save commuting time and costs, and achieve a higher quality of life. In 2021, Italy registered 33 million commuters, 22 million workers, and 11 million students (ISTAT, 2023). The workers’ commuters spend, on average, 70 euros per month and 72 min a day to reach their workplace, costs that could well be reduced by a permanent or quasi-permanent smart working schedule (Aksoy et al., 2023). Today increasingly, individuals and even entire start-up teams, especially in the creative sector, follow the idea of a location-independent style of working and living. Smart working has changed the way people work, and, as a result, spaces must also change to support them.

Performance on the job and workplace quality are closely related (Pasini et al., 2021), and productivity is positively impacted in environments where the worker may continuously regenerate physically and psychologically. Environments that support the process of renewing physical, psychological, and social capabilities that have been lost as a result of continual efforts to meet adaptive needs (known as “restoration”) are defined as restorative environments (Pasini et al., 2021). Beyond the physical perception of comfort (indoor air quality, noise, lighting, and thermal comfort; Bluyssen et al., 2011), other factors of the surrounding environment significantly affect the individuals. In particular, natural environments have been found to provide positive esthetic and emotional experiences (Ulrich, 1983), mitigate and prevent stress (Kaplan, 1995), and affect directed attention abilities (Berman et al., 2008). Among them, researchers have demonstrated the existence of strong correlations between pleasantness and wellbeing with green, i.e., trees and grass (Dzhambov and Dimitrova, 2014; Watts, 2017), water elements, i.e., fountains, waterfalls, streams, and water basins (Watts et al., 2009; Jeon et al., 2010; De Coensel et al., 2011), and their combination (Axelsson et al., 2014; Chau et al., 2018; Lugten et al., 2018; Chung et al., 2019). In built urban environments, the qualities and attributes of natural elements that people find appealing and esthetically pleasing can be used (Zhang et al., 2017; Scopelliti et al., 2019), or reproduced to promote psychological restoration (Berto et al., 2015; Masullo et al., 2021a). This is in line with the ART Theory (Kaplan, 1995) and other studies which state that performance benefits from exposure to environments that attract effortless involuntary attention and fascination. Due to the high potential of fascination, places with high historical and architectural value can also provide high restorative effects (Weber and Trojan, 2018). This is also confirmed by the recent studies of Wang et al. (2023) on typical cultural heritage sites in China and Masullo et al. (2021b) on Italian cloisters and Turkish Khan. For Galindo and Hidalgo (2005) and Hidalgo et al. (2006), cultural-historical and recreational places were considered more attractive than panoramic places and housing areas. Moreover, restorativeness was found to be a significant predictor of a place’s attractiveness. Comparing a historical site, an urban park, a panoramic promenade, and a shopping mall, Fornara and Troffa (2009) showed how historical sites can be perceived as fascinating, pleasant, and relaxing, as well as the urban park, while resulting in more restorative than panoramic promenade and a shopping mall. More in general, different types of urban spaces elicit several dimensions of mood (Rapuano et al., 2022), e.g., green parks induced greater feelings of calm than colorful parks and squares, while colorful parks were generally rated as more energizing than calming. In addition, different lifestyles affect individuals’ overall quality of life differently (Botta, 2016; Kim et al., 2019). Regarding the latter aspect, the slow living philosophy came to fruition through CittàSlow Movement, born in 1999 by the mayor of Greve in Chianti, and is now spread worldwide. It draws up a series of “good practices,” starting from the assumptions of Slow Food, that improve the quality of life in small villages. Slow life, therefore, refers to the health of citizens, quality of local food and respect for traditions and culture, and time spent enjoying the cultural and natural landscapes that the small villages offer (Parkins and Craig, 2006).

Small villages with historical, architectural, naturalistic elements and slow-life features are then a potential platform where vacation and work could merge easily. The increasing investments in their digital connectivity can then transform them into an excellent location for hosting smart workers and digital nomads. Nowadays, in these small villages and countryside (Bosworth et al., 2023), that suffer a strong phenomenon of depopulation, there are several ongoing projects that promote the realization of local smart working policies (Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, 2022). In this context, the way the smart/co-working spaces are realized assumes a strong importance (Bosworth et al., 2023).

Smart work reinforces the making of collaborative spaces in two ways: First, it disrupts the spatial divisions classified by codes of land uses and space uses (Hu, 2020). It introduces a smart design paradigm that incorporates this spatial disruption and creates collaborative spaces to enable innovative knowledge production. Second, the collaborative space further goes beyond a physical dimension, integrating the ‘space of flow’ and the ‘space of place’ (Castells, 2010) to capture the spatiality in a network society, in knowledge production, consumption, and sharing. At the same time, co-working space definition refers to “flexible, shared, rentable, and community-oriented workspaces occupied by professionals from diverse sectors” that are “designed to encourage collaboration, creativity, idea sharing, networking, socializing, and generating new business opportunities for small firms, start-ups, and freelancers” (Fuzi, 2015). Orel (2019) studied the co-working spaces and concluded that co-working helps address the challenges associated with work–leisure balance and is seen as a venue for socializing and even wellbeing. In addition, the concept of the co-working space helps to self-discipline and retain work-related routines (Reichenberger, 2018; Cook, 2020).

Smart/co-working spaces should be, then, flexible, shared, rentable, and community-oriented. They should be designed to encourage tourism, collaboration, creativity, idea sharing, networking, socializing, and generating new business opportunities for small firms, start-ups, and freelancers (Bosworth et al., 2023). The restorative impact of historical and architectural elements (Galindo and Hidalgo, 2005; Hidalgo et al., 2006) on smart workers and digital nomads could be emphasized with the realization of temporary rooms, or offices, for smart working located both inside the main tourist attractions (museums, convent complexes, historic buildings) and in symbolic outdoor locations (central squares, belvederes; Chevtaeva and Denizci-Guillet, 2021).

Furthermore, it should be noted that despite facing depopulation, a lack of employment opportunities, and a lack of essential services, many small Italian villages representing 70% of Italian cities and 11 millions of residents have relevant regenerative potential and may be appropriate for smart/co-working applications (Greenreport, 2022; ISTAT, 2022). In addition, the retrofit actions for energy and to optimize occupants’ wellbeing for Italian historic buildings (for example, for smart/co-working application) located in small historical villages cause frequently disadvantages related to structure and existing regulations constraints (Galatioto et al., 2019). In particular, the constraints of the existing regulations for the preservation of the historic value of buildings make energy refurbishment very challenging because the application of passive and active energy strategies is often in contrast with architectural features in most cases, and the best available technologies are not applicable since they are in contrast with the conservation of their historic value and occur frequently difficulty in installing renewable energy sources due to architectural law constraints that are applied often not only on the building but also on the district where they are located (Galatioto et al., 2019). Therefore, creating a self-sustaining, eco-friendly, modular, and flexible mobile building for smart/co-working could aid small communities’ social and economic revival with high regeneration potential.

As part of a wide research project aimed to design and prototype a prefabricated movable building (PMB), different design solutions were studied for smart/co-working and optimized for occupants’ wellbeing, energy performance, and integration with outdoor architectural/historical/landscape elements. Modular solutions of PMBs, self-sustaining in energy use, renewable energy-based, eco-friendly, and flexible in the setup were also proposed (Castanò et al., 2022; Maffei et al., 2022, 2023). The proposed PMB does not require interventions on the existing heritage for installation and therefore represents a sustainable solution in all historical places subject to regulatory constraints. The proposed PMB mobile office is suitable for temporary uses and, therefore, removable when the use of the area it occupies is required. Regarding the construction and transformability of the unit, a “kit-of-parts” system was developed, and they can be juxtaposed in several different configurations according to the location of their installation. The floor area of different PMBs’ configurations ranges from about 15 m² to 100 m², and their size can be modulated proportionally (e.g., the floor area of the PMB compared to the area of the square is about 5%) to those of the small village squares which can range, e.g., in the Campania Region (Italy), from about 300 m² to 3,000 m². The PMB offices are equipped with large smart windows and natural ventilation grilles. The smart window’s vast size and the natural ventilation grilles serve to provide a high level of visual and acoustics interaction with the landscape and soundscape to offer potential regenerative benefits to the worker through a multisensory experience related to the context in which the office is located (Browning and Ryan, 2020).

Although the prefabricated movable building design has been tested in terms of energy efficiency, economic benefit, and environmental impact under different configurations (Maffei et al., 2023), it is still not investigated if these proposed temporary office solutions can improve the occupant wellbeing, enhance, or keep constant the general working performances. To this aim, positioning virtually a PMB office in different surrounding contexts and simulating the physical stimuli at the worker position, this study aims to establish if small villages’ squares contexts can affect workers’ sense of restoration and working performance, through the verification of the following hypotheses:

The first part of this section describes the characteristics of the three sites selected to contextualize the office during the experimental sessions, and the procedures and tools used to record and reproduce the audio and visual stimuli in the laboratory. The second part presents the questionnaires administered to participants.

The outline of the experimental design is discussed in section 3.1, the details of the participants are reported in section 3.2, and the procedure performed is described in section 3.3.

After verifying the respect of the ANOVA assumptions and identifying potential outliers, and missing values (Tabachnick and Fidell, 1996), several repeated measure (RM) one-way ANOVAs were prepared. In particular, to compare the cognitive performance in the different experimental conditions, four different one-way RM-ANOVAs that treated the scenario as a three-level within-subject factor (CBD, HIS, and HIS-W) were carried out on the averaged values of the self-reported cognitive performance (partial-SCP) questionnaire and on each of the items of the scale: attention (ATT), concentration (CONC) and not-distraction (NOT-DIS). The results showed that neither the partial-SCP nor their items were found to be different from each other. In particular, this result shows that working (laptop work, reading, and writing) inside offices that offer high levels of visual and acoustic interactions with surroundings, such as the PMBs, in movable structures located in small villages’ squares where the life rhythms are slow, and in front of historical buildings and close to water elements, does not alter the working performances respect to work in large city’s traditional office (CBD).

These results can be explained by the fact that external factors affecting cognitive performance are generally loud/intense and/or are poor in quality. Jahncke et al. investigated noise levels varying from about 30 to 60 dB(A) due to typical background office noise (e.g., air-conditioning and PC) with the additional telephone and voice signals (Jahncke et al., 2011), while Monteiro et al. investigated noise levels ranging from about 45 to 68 dB(A) composed of environmental noise of fast food with alarm sounds (Monteiro et al., 2018). Both found that decreases were found in performing both mental and manual activities as the sound levels increased. On the other hand, at noise levels as low as 40 dB, the negative connotation of external road traffic noise can be responsible for the decline in working performance (Müller et al., 2023). This means that less frequent negative events (e.g., cars or motos pass-by and sirens) combined with natural or anthropic sounds may induce a positive emotional state in the individuals without draining attentive sources. In terms of the effect of visual stimuli, while those related to the brightness of the surroundings (Hvass et al., 2021; Masullo et al., 2022) and possible glare effects due to the sun (Rodriguez et al., 2016) have been mis-considered in this experiment, those related to the quality of the vision were found not to influence the working performances (e.g., distract them significantly from work). Considering the combination of the visual and auditory stimuli, De Korte et al. evaluated that the subjects who work in an open office environment were exposed to different types of visual or auditory distractions (walking past the visual field of the subject and telephone conversations within hearing distance). Their results showed that participants’ performance, concentration, and emotion were not affected while performing a simple computer task (De Korte et al., 2007).

On the other hand, to compare the perceived restorativeness during the working activities, several one-way RM-ANOVAs that treated the scenario as a three-level within-subject factor (CBD, HIS, and HIS-W) were carried out on the PRS-11 scale and each single item: Fascination, Being-Away, Coherence, or Scope. The four one-way RM-ANOVAs were conducted to determine whether perceived restorativeness levels differed across the working conditions.

The results show that a statistically significant difference exists [F(2,58) = 8.87, p < 0.01] for the component Fascination. Post-hoc Tukey’s tests revealed that this component was significantly higher in participants while working in the Scenarios HIS (mean = 6.07) and HIS-W (mean = 5.76) than CBD (mean = 4.16; Figure 3A). Similarly, a statistically significant difference exists [F(2,58) = 24.89, p < 0.0001] for the component Being-Away. Post-hoc Tukey’s tests, again, revealed that the Being-Away was significantly higher in participants while working in the Scenarios HIS (mean = 6.80) and HIS-W (mean = 5.80) than CBD (mean = 3.18; Figure 3B).

A less but still statistically significant difference resulted from the Coherence [F(2,58) = 3.72, p < 0.05] and Scope [F(2,58) = 3.26, p < 0.05]. Post-hoc Dunnet’s tests revealed that the Coherence was significantly lower in participants while working in the Scenarios CBD (mean = 4.90) than HIS (mean = 6.19) and HIS-WS (mean = 6.18; Figure 4A). Again, post-hoc Dunnet’s tests revealed that Scope was significantly lower in participants while working in the Scenarios CBD (mean = 5.30) than HIS-W (mean = 6.64; Figure 4B).

The results on the complete PRS-11 scale still show a statistically significant difference existing [F(2,58) = 12.59, p < 0.0001]. Post-hoc Tukey’s tests revealed that perceived restoration was significantly higher working in the HIS (mean = 6.21) and HIS-W (mean = 6.09) than CBD (mean = 4.38; Figure 5).

The results can be explained by the fact that the restorative benefits obtained by workers are significantly higher when subjected to positively evaluated visual (historical buildings, vegetation, and fountain) and auditory stimuli (natural or anthropic sounds). The results about the HIS and HIS-W scenarios are in line with the previous literature which associates to this kind of context an increasing of two of the sub-dimensions of the PRS-11, the Fascination and Being-Away. A possible explanation is that, respectively, there is a “natural” attractiveness of vision toward the view of the historical buildings, as well as to listen to natural or anthropic sounds, and the contexts of the small villages foster a sense of being away from the routine working environment.

Temporary offices have been proposed as a possible solution to fight depopulation and the low economic level of small villages and countryside, to limit the concentration of environmental pollutants in urban areas, and to foster slow and more sustainable lifestyles. To this aim, the prefabricated movable building proposed by Maffei et al. (2023) was designed and tested under different configurations to guarantee energy-efficient solutions, enhance the local economy, and reduce the environmental impact. However, the possibility of access to new work modalities cannot neglect the importance of understanding the influence the surrounding environment can have on the workers.

This means that working in close contact (visually and auditory) with historical or water elements (e.g., historical buildings and fountains), where the life stream slowly, the workers’ wellbeing, improved, as shown by the increase of the restorativeness perception. This is mainly due to the rise in Fascination and Being-away of the visual contexts. At the same time, the research proves that the slow and quiet activities occurring in the squares of the small villages, just in front of the working position, do not influence working performance, concentration, and attention.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethical review and approval were not required for this study, in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. However, the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all the participants provided a written informed consent to participate in this study.

LM, AC, and MM: conception and design of the study. AC: measurements. AC and RM: material collection, experiment setup, experimental sessions, writing the first draft of the manuscript, and data collections. RM: graphics and visualization. MM: statistical analysis. LM and MM: writing and reviewing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.