The concept of metamaterials has offered platforms for unconventional tailoring and manipulation of the light-matter interaction. In this dissertation, we explore several concepts and designs within this scope. We investigate some of the electromagnetic characteristics of the concept of “static optics”, i.e., wave interaction with structures in which both the relative effective permittivity and permeability attain near-zero values at a given operating frequency and thus the spatial distributions of the electric and magnetic fields exhibit curl-free features, while the fields are temporally dynamic. Using such structures, one might in principle ‘open up’ and ‘stretch’ the space, and have regions behaving electromagnetically as ‘single points’ despite being electrically large. We study some of the wave-matter interaction in these platforms and suggest possible designs for implementation of such structures in different frequency regimes and experimentally verify our findings in the microwave regime. Another research direction that is explored in this dissertation is the development of some nonreciprocal metaplatforms. We investigate theoretically an approach through which one-way electromagnetic wave flow can be achieved using properly designed nonlinearity combined with structural asymmetry. The approach is rather general and applicable for any desired frequency regime and opens doors for high performance “electromagnetic diodes” and nonreciprocal metasurfaces and metastructures. We also theoretically study the usage of time-dependent materials in achieving wave flow isolation within plasmonic waveguides environments. We also provide physical remarks on our various findings.