Digital Business Management Students Place Third in Map the System Competition
HLOs: 
By Hanadi Alnawab and Steven Lorini
Third-year Digital Business Management students Igor and Vitor earned third place in the 6th Annual Map the System competition at Humber Polytechnic. The event, held on the evening of Thursday, May 1, 2025, at Humber’s Downtown Campus, featured presentations from the top six teams and concluded with awards recognizing the winning students and teams.
Their project, Brainrot, examined the growing issue of digital addiction through a systems-thinking framework. The project title was inspired by Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, brain rot, defined as “... the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially due to overconsumption of trivial content.”
Brainrot: In the Attention Economy
Igor and Vitor explored how the design of digital platforms—particularly social media—often prioritizes user engagement over well-being. This dynamic has contributed to rising concerns about cognitive decline, shortened attention spans, and mental health challenges, especially among youth. Through a systems-thinking lens, the project proposed a range of solutions centred on education, ethical design, and digital literacy, emphasizing that awareness is the first step toward a healthier, more sustainable digital future.
Tackling Digital Addiction Through Systems Thinking
The project highlighted the underlying economic structure behind the system. This is where personal data is harvested through digital technologies, analyzed, and sold to predict and influence behaviour, creating a profit-driven cycle designed to keep users engaged and fuel compulsive digital behaviour at the cost of mental well-being. The team explored how companies capture and monetize attention using:
- Slot machine design – Delivering unpredictable rewards to drive compulsive checking.
- Infinite scroll – Eliminating natural stopping points to prolong use.
- Digital rewards – Leveraging likes, shares, and views as dopamine-driven social validation.
- AI-driven personalization – Tracking user behaviour to feed an endless loop of tailored content.
Dissecting the Business of Attention: Incentives, Design, and Systemic Impact
Support for the project came from Map the System faculty coaches across both the Business - Marketing and Business Management diploma programs. This cross-faculty collaboration provided extensive mentorship and strategic guidance throughout the semester and exemplifies the Longo Faculty of Business’s commitment to interdisciplinary learning and applied research.
“Approaching the topic through a systems thinking framework, Igor and Vitor explored the strategic business mechanics behind capturing and retaining user attention. Their analysis covered the monetization of time-on-platform, the intentional design of infinite scroll, gamification, and dopamine-driven interface tactics — all components of a broader economic model that powers the modern attention economy. At its core, the project revealed how users themselves become the product, transformed into transactions within a highly engineered digital marketplace.”
Steven Lorini, MTS Coach and Business Management Diploma Program Coordinator
With increasing student engagement and impactful outcomes, the Map the System competition continues to be a valuable opportunity for students to explore social and economic systems through research and critical thinking. The Longo Faculty of Business looks forward to next year’s competition in 2026.
Congratulations to Igor and Vitor on their exceptional work, which reflects the strength of applied, critical thinking central to the Digital Business Management program.
