One aspect of NSF that gets underpromoted is the funding of small workshops where experts get together and chart new territories. Noodling around the University of Maryland HCIL site, I ran across the results of the Workshop on Creativity Support Tools.
Led by Ben Schneiderman and Gerhard Fischer, the workshop roster is pretty impressive, including folks like Richard Florida, Peter Freeman, Brad Meyers, Randy Pausch, John Maeda, and Mary Czerwinski, just to name a few. Definitely something to sink the teeth into.