The iconoclastic Israeli graphic designer, typographer and type designer Oded Ezer is in residence on the East Coast for two months, lecturing and teaching a class called “Type Follows Emotion, Personal Typographic Exploration” at Rhode Island School of Design.Perhaps best known for what he calls his “typographic design fiction projects,” including “Typosperma,” which was part of MoMA’s 2008 “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, and the design of The New American Haggadah, Ezer mostly earns his living by licensing his original typefaces through his HebrewTypography foundry. When he’s not designing marketable typefaces, he’s a kind of typographic mad scientist, giving letterforms wings and legs, amputating their parts or surgically attaching them to his own face and body.His RISD students are now part of the grand experiment, working on an assignment called Typographic Therapy. “Can type cure?” Ezer asks rhetorically. “Or can it function as a psychological test to examine one’s personality characteristics and emotional well-being?” Ezer was one of 20 graphic designers and illustrators commissioned to interpret a work of fiction by BritishIndian novelist Hari Kunzru for the recent exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, “Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace.” The novella takes place after the world’s information infrastructure is wiped out by an immense magnetic storm. It is a dark age in which technology and knowledge are gone. Recording, writing, and art are outlawed. “No one remembers what words used to mean,” Ezer explains. “They have new definitions.” He illustrated each one of eight new definitions with a typographic video. The “Customer” is consuming the letters. “Feedback” is a continuous loop of photos of Ezer mouthing the definition.