Yes, you can come at these kind of questions from both the applications point-of-view and also from a fundamental understanding point-of-view. For example, on the application side I saw a talk recently about a theoretical proposal for light-induced superconductivity in semi-conductors. There, you "dump" energy into your semiconductor by shining a laser on it, causing the fundamental properties of the material to drastically change -- realizing a superconductor in a conventional semiconductor!

From the fundamental perspective, there's lots of questions that are being asked. I guess the most general question is something along the lines of "how does quantum mechanics recover statistical mechanics?" where statistical mechanics is the theory used to describe the behavior of macroscopic objects (e.g., what happens when you heat up a big chunk of metal?). Another question which I think is interesting (and related to the application side) is can one realize "new states of matter" (e.g., new properties or behaviours) by doing something out-of-equilibrium and waiting for this new steady state? Can we get behaviors which aren't realized in equilibrium?

It's certainly an interesting field to be working in at the moment!