On the one hand, researchers have studied factors that influence collaboration and on the other, researchers have proposed models of collaborative problem solving. However, we have not found research on the relation between these factors and the dimensions used in order to describe the collaborative activity within the models. This article's goal is to propose such relations for a situation of collaborative design, mediated by computer and carried out at a distance. We will show two main relations that emerged from our corpus. Firstly, dialogue utterances between partners that have a dominant social aspect are positively related to the symmetry of the entire dyadic interaction in terms of partners' contributions. Secondly, dialogue utterances that predominantly deal with expressing what partners are doing is negatively related to the extent to which partners are aligned. This research also extends the field of applicability of the cooperative activity model proposed in Baker (2002).